Human / Immortal Speciation

[Darth Fluffy 377]

6 hours ago, Amiable Dorsai said:

Reviving an old thread, perhaps Immortals come from another Human lineage entirely, such as Neanderthals or Denisovans who were granted Magic and took things in a different direction. Neanderthals and Sapiens had some interfertility, at least, since some of us have genes that match DNA extracted from Neanderthal remains. Suppose, for example that a few Magical Neanderthals, watching their species go extinct, wished for, worked for and were finally granted spells that led toward Immortal status. They adopted Sapiens as a sort of pet species, that they would advise, torment or ignore as suited any individual Immortal. They're somewhat interfertile, with most, but not all offspring muling out in the first generation. But those few fertile offspring spread Magic among their offspring, who, getting little to no attention from grandparents who forgot them merged into Sapiens society creating Magic lineages among us.

Bearing in mind that 'immortals' in the EGS context are a race of magical beings that have various human-like traits were invented whole cloth for the comic, and pretty much only as much as needed, and especially  in retrospect, they are not entirely consistent, and expecting them to fully conform to a logical framework seems a bit delusional. 

For instance, do they reproduce? They seem to mostly not do so, in fact they often avoid each other and have good reason to; also more so than humans, they do not trust each other, and that's saying a lot; we are not known for our mutual trust. 

Our sole example of an immortal mating is Pandora mating with Blake, a human, and producing Adrian; we are assured this is not unique, all wizards are a result of such a union. So again, the system is plot driven, rather than strictly logical.

If immortals do reproduce, can the eventually overpopulate the magic realm(s)? How exactly are they empowered? If magic is their 'food', can they exhaust it? 'Magic' as a being of sorts just kicks the can down the road. 

They do not appear to have much going in the way of romance. Even Pandora's attachment to Blake was based on alleviating boredom. Her attachment to her own son, Adrian, was dominated by her boredom response; a near-omniscient being could scarcely see the consequences of her choices. Again, plot driven, near the end of her life, she developed a sense of motherly attachment toward her descendants. Hope seems born with such, and she seems different from the immortals we've seen.

I like the immortal milieu in the context of the EGS comic, but it does not hold up to extensive scrutiny outside of context.

That said, "Why are immortals anything like humans, and why can they interbreed?" seems to say they were once eons ago human, though not necessarily so. They could have found humans interesting, and patterned themselves after them; they might be using magic in causing an ability to reproduce. If they descended from humans, it might be from another species, although there is no in-universe reason to think so at this point. 

I'll offer a dark interpretation for immortal population control. They breed without limit but 'food' in the form of magic is limited. The mitigation is this, though insubstantial much of the time, they are still influenced by the matter near them. As a result, vast numbers are blown away into space by solar wind constantly. These cannot survive; the magic aggregates around the physical body of the planet, and they soon starve, which looks a lot like evaporation. Only those few who learn to stay near their planet live to see the ripe old age of 200 or more. Those that bond with humans actually have an advantage, their bond keeps them close to their source of magic. 

Also, space whales eat them if they stray out far enough. Yum!

[mlooney 3,793]

4 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

They seem to mostly not do so, in fact they often avoid each other and have good reason to; also more so than humans, they do not trust each other, and that's saying a lot; we are not known for our mutual trust. 

We have seen seven or eight, I think, named immortals and a handful of nameless ones.  Of the named 2 are either a brother and sister pair or a mated pair. Most  of the named ones were seen working together, vs. a major threat.  I'm not sure if that supports an “avoid each other” conclusion.  Even Pandora said it was possible that she was just an introvert as to why she didn't have any contact with other immortals.

[Darth Fluffy 377]

3 hours ago, mlooney said:

We have seen seven or eight, I think, named immortals and a handful of nameless ones.  Of the named 2 are either a brother and sister pair or a mated pair. Most  of the named ones were seen working together, vs. a major threat.  I'm not sure if that supports an “avoid each other” conclusion.  Even Pandora said it was possible that she was just an introvert as to why she didn't have any contact with other immortals.

Further evidence of not mating, all of the new ones we've seen were reboots, and were not infants. Nor have we seen immortal children nor infants. Perhaps it was deemed too dangerous to have powerful magical beings who had the self control of toddlers. 

Pandora is an outlier. Everyone else might have been specifically avoiding her because of her advanced age hence inherent instability. But we have not seen them seeming to act social with each other. Consider also, Zeus wants to party . . . with humans, apparently.

[mlooney 3,793]

1 hour ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Further evidence of not mating, all of the new ones we've seen were reboots, and were not infants.

True, Hope even said she was the equal of a young human woman, not a middle school child.  And was sort of upset that she looked like she was 14ish.  Immortal reproduction, assuming that they are, in fact, immortal, has to be very slow or the world would be overrun with them.  My best guess is that one in a thousand or so resets “splits” the immortal into 2.

[Amiable Dorsai 74]

9 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

...expecting them to fully conform to a logical framework seems a bit delusional. 

 

Certainly. The Immortals will have properties and, if it ever becomes necessary for the story Dan wants to tell, a history convenient for it.  But fans will be fans, and we all think faster than 6 strips a week, Our imaginations will roam.  If the stories and characters stimulate us,  many of us will try to, if nothing else, infer the backstories of the characters we love.  Hence the enormous amounts of fanfiction out there..
 

[mlooney 3,793]

32 minutes ago, Amiable Dorsai said:

Hence the enormous amounts of fanfiction out there.

286 works on AO3, excluding three from an author that has one with EGS as a fandom along with like 50 others.  As AO3 fanfic goes, that's not a lot.   Impressive, but nothing like some other fandoms.

[Don Edwards 577]

There is a species or subspecies of hominid that we know only one thing about: a bit of their DNA got into the inhabitants of a cave in north-central Asia, who were mostly Denisovan but also had distinctive traces of H.Sapiens and Neanderthal DNA. (You can find traces of both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in some populations of modern humans.)

And that's ALL we know about them. We have no fossils of them, except the DNA traces in fossils of that tribe. We've found no identifiable trace of their DNA in fossils from anywhere else. Because we know so little, it's pretty much a guess when or where that subspecies met that tribe's ancestors. For that matter, we know too little to have assigned them an actual name.

There's a similar situation in central Africa. With a different species/subspecies. Or maybe more than one - that's just how little we know of them. We think the division between that subspecies (assuming only one) and modern humans predates the division between Neanderthal and modern humans.

And let's not forget about H.floresiensis in southeast Asia and some nearby islands. Thought to have gone extinct about 50,000 years ago, but at least one scientist is looking for live ones. And yep, there's traces of their DNA in some living human populations.

----

Raven is somewhere over 400 years old. And fertile with (at least some) normal humans, to the point that he has surviving descendants. If - assumption with very little evidence - he and his descendants are as fertile with humans as a normal human, then statistically a noticeable fraction of the population of Europe and North America should be descended from him; if he's over about 1000 years old, then make that "statistically all...".

And he's only one child of immortals. It's rather less likely (but not impossible) that the Kitsune line of mages are descended from him, so there probably are (or have been) other hybrid human/immortal children. Most likely some of them were born thousands of years ago, if not tens of thousands. People who could use magic should be a lot more common than it appears. Maybe there's a large population who could but don't know it...

[mlooney 3,793]

Raven wasn't a horn dog.  One person, even 1000 years ago, isn't going to have spread their genes to “all of Europe.”

[mlooney 3,793]

11 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Raven wasn't a horn dog.  One person, even 1000 years ago, isn't going to have spread their genes to “all of Europe.”

If they did, there would be a lot more green-eyed gingers, for one example.

[Don Edwards 577]

2 hours ago, mlooney said:

Raven wasn't a horn dog.  One person, even 1000 years ago, isn't going to have spread their genes to “all of Europe.”

Actually... a human generation is often thought of as 30 years, but if you look at our biology, 20 years is more than enough. Let's go with the larger number, and to make the math easier shift it up to 33.333... years. So 100 years is 3 generations, 1000 years is 30.

Assume an average of two surviving children per adult. 

30 generations gives about 1.07 billion.

The population of Europe and the United States - according to Wikipedia - is about 1.08 billion.

The difference between reality and "everyone's descended from..." pretty much amounts to where the family trees are actually tangled vines.

[Darth Fluffy 377]

13 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:

Actually... a human generation is often thought of as 30 years, but if you look at our biology, 20 years is more than enough. 

Even more so before widespread mechanization, where children were a significant sector of the labor force, and the childhood death rates were higher. So for most of human history.

[ijuin 609]

13 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

And he's only one child of immortals. It's rather less likely (but not impossible) that the Kitsune line of mages are descended from him, so there probably are (or have been) other hybrid human/immortal children. 

I would not think that any predominantly-Japanese lines would be descended from him due to the extreme lack of Japanese outbreeding in the 16th-19th centuries—foreigners were all but banned from even setting foot on Japanese soil outside of a few ports, and it was a capital offense for Japanese subjects to leave the country without explicit government permission. Thus, the amount of non-Japanese blood coming into Japanese families was close to zero.

[Darth Fluffy 377]

1 hour ago, ijuin said:

I would not think that any predominantly-Japanese lines would be descended from him due to the extreme lack of Japanese outbreeding in the 16th-19th centuries—foreigners were all but banned from even setting foot on Japanese soil outside of a few ports, and it was a capital offense for Japanese subjects to leave the country without explicit government permission. Thus, the amount of non-Japanese blood coming into Japanese families was close to zero.

That is true, yet Japanese investment in Hawaii started pretty early, and by WW II there were enough Japanese people in the US to prompt the interment fiasco.

[ijuin 609]

4 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

That is true, yet Japanese investment in Hawaii started pretty early, and by WW II there were enough Japanese people in the US to prompt the interment fiasco.

So any interbreeding would have been only in the last few generations. To return to the notion of the Kitsunes having Adrian’s genes, he would have to have done it recently enough that Noriko and Mamass would have known about having a half-Japanese grandparent/great-grandparent.

If we count from when the comic began, the teenaged cast are Millennials, so their parents would mainly be Boomers/early GenX. Grandparents (Arthur’s age) would be Silent Generation or younger end of “Greatest” Generation (i.e. born 1920s-40s). So that would put Noriko and Mamase born in the 1960s, to parents born around WW2, and grandparents born 1910-25, and great-grandparents born 1880-1900.

[Amiable Dorsai 74]

On 10/9/2025 at 9:40 AM, mlooney said:

Impressive, but nothing like some other fandoms.

I meant fanfiction in general, on the theory that much of it is generated by fans speculating on dangling threads. Though I will admit that more of it seems to be driven by fans' libidos.

[mlooney 3,793]

57 minutes ago, Amiable Dorsai said:

Though I will admit that more of it seems to be driven by fans' libidos.

That does fit a lot of fanfic.

[Darth Fluffy 377]

2 hours ago, mlooney said:

That does fit a lot of fanfic.

She was an old Westinghouse floor fan, a vintage model that had seen better days, with more years on her than many of the folks she cooled. But her motor was still sound, and her cord still carried the juice from the wall outlet; she had one job to do, and she was going to do it and fulfill her purpose. So she continued, performing her endless blow job.

[mlooney 3,793]

/me.  Have a spinning star.

[Darth Fluffy 377]

2 hours ago, mlooney said:

/me.  Have a spinning star.

Not a fan of fans?

[mlooney 3,793]

22 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Not a fan of fans?

I am, however, my housemate, aka Explorer the Cat, freaks out for several minutes after I turn on or off the ceiling fan.

[Darth Fluffy 377]

4 hours ago, mlooney said:

I am, however, my housemate, aka Explorer the Cat, freaks out for several minutes after I turn on or off the ceiling fan.

"How am I supposed to jump up there?!"

[mlooney 3,793]

18 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

"How am I supposed to jump up there?!"

I strongly suspect it's something left over from her barn cat days. A change in light shadows is never really a good thing if you are a barn cat.  Rain or other bad weather is the best “bad” thing that could happen.  She always runs under the bed, which would be dry in case of rain, plus protection from the hawk, if it's that.  She stays there for at least 30 minutes.