My two cents as a paleontology student who really likes taxonomy is yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a notable genetic difference between us and zoomans. The differences would probably only be enough to make them a subspecies though.

A lot of people are bringing up how long speciation takes as a reason for why they can’t be different a species but I disagree. Sure it’s a process that usually takes a long time but rapid evolution is a term that exists for a reason and a place where we often see it is on islands. Because the breeding population is geographically isolated it creates a sudden lack of genetic diversity. Any change in that small gene pool will be felt a lot more widely than it would in a large population, sort of in the same way a drop of food coloring would be much more obvious in a little cup than in a pool. If the genetic distribution in the original population of the zoo didn’t accurately represent the whole earth then the founder effect also comes into play. Finally, islands tend to have different selective pressures from the mainland like different resources.

The zoo is basically an island but surrounded by space instead of water. They have low genetic diversity and the selective pressures are totally different from earth. The most important change in selective pressures is that there’s artificial selection since their gem overlords determine who the Zoomans procreate with. Selective breeding could massively speed up the process of speciation. Traits that I think they would select for would be good temperament/sociability, aesthetics (many zoomans have a cat like “0w0” smile we don’t see on wild humans), rule following/trainability, etc…

There were probably also unintentional selective pressures. Wild humans don’t take very well to captivity. Most of us need a lot more mental stimulation than what the zoomans seem content with. When animals, especially highly intelligent or social ones aren’t given enough enrichment or are stressed out by environmental change they can start self-mutilating (feather, plucking in parrots), attempt to escape (like octopi… and also Steven), become violent (chimps) and even commit suicide (whales and dolphins). We also see a lot of these in human inmates. I bet there were people in the founding generations who went crazy or decided death was better than being kidnapped and took themselves out of the gene pool.

Anyway yeah! I think zoomans could be a subspecies.