Sure, but it seems pretty much all D&D “species” can interbreed, in which case those are no longer edge cases and perhaps the word “race” makes more sense. In

Sure, but it seems pretty much all D&D “species” can interbreed, in which case those are no longer edge cases and perhaps the word “race” makes more sense. In D&D is there a history of how the different races came to be? Did they have some sort of diverging point from a single ancestor?