Half human hybrid descendants

Lots of stories have Half-Human Hybrids, be they mated with elves, aliens, or whatever.

But are there any stories that explore the descendents of those? Unless the hybrids are sterile, half elves will mate with either elves or humans, leading to either 1/4 elves or 3/4 elves. And if you go down the bloodline long enough, you'll end up with 1/16 elves, or 15/16. How many generations before they're considered full elf again? And that's not even going into other races. What about dwarves? Much as they hate each other, a mating may occur at some point, and you've got a elf/dwarf. Another generation and you've got a human/elf/dwarf. Add a couple thousand years, and you got elf/dwarf/human/orc/asari.

So, has any story actually taken that to its conclusion? And now that question is bugging me now. If a half elf is made, how many generations of breeding with just elves would it take before the offspring are considered full elf again?

Frankly, this question strikes me as pretty silly given the inherent implausibility of Half Human Hybrids. I've written works with Interspecies Romance, but all cases children have explicitly not been an option*

. So this is not an idea I'd been too interested in running with.

If you want to do it, though, check out Heinz Hybrid, which covers where this has been explored in fiction.

edited 6th Aug '11 11:51:28 PM by nrjxll

Some stories have toyed with it, for example Katharine Kerr's Deverry books. It's always been rumoured that the people living in a certain area had 'elf blood' in them from generations back, and it was most likely true. I think that once the elvish/human features faded, nobody really considered them fraction-elves.

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Given that Uneven Hybrid is my YKTTW brainchild, this is one of my areas of duty.

For duty, duty, must be done, the rule applies to everyone;

In an unfinished setting of mine, quite a few characters belong to a Human Subspecies of genetically engineered Half Human Hybrids. Only two were created artificially; the rest are all born naturally via crossbreeding with baseline humans, since the original two consider each other siblings - and true to form, one of the originals have some problems with conceiving a child with a baseline-human father. That is, her baseline-human half-brother is the only possible candidate for a father, for non-genetic reasons^note to be specific, her hyperactive immune system doesn't just make her immune to most disease but also aggressively attacks and destroys any foreign tissue in her body, including embryos; the reason why he can still impregnate her is because he's very barely close enough to her genetically to fool her immune system into thinking that the embryo is her own tissue and leaving it alone... not that it's much of a problem. With his contribution to her side of the gene pool, this limitation is bred out of the genome and their daughter is fully fertile, as are all of her descendants.

The abnormal not-quite-human traits^note mostly limited to physiological changes: different hormone levels and brain chemistry, denser muscle and bone tissue, supercharged immune system and cellular division rate of these individuals are all genetic and dominant, resulting in every single one of their descendants inheriting them completely. There's no supernatural component involved and due to the altered breed's extremely long (1000+ years) natural lifespan - arising from a combination of constantly regenerating telomeres and other physiological factors, engineered into the breed due to their Healing Factor's accelerated cellular division rate reaching the Hayflick Limit much too early - plus the alterations' genetically dominant nature meaning that the offspring of an altered and a baseline will always be an altered, they breed into the gene pool at an almost exponential rate in the first few centuries of their existence (limited only by the fact that not all of them get a new partner after their previous one died of old age) and have a very good chance at completely replacing baseline humans with their own kind within a dozen millenia.

Now that you mention it the only works I can think of that even acknowledge the possibility are The Elder Scrolls and a throwaway line in Log Horizon. Btw scientist have discovered that people of Eurasian descent have a small amount of Neanderthal DNA in their genome. So it's not just possible, it's happened.

~Hey Yew! Don't tell me there's no hope at aaaaallllllll!~

It probably depends on the universe and the ammount of realism. In real-world-like universe = never, because of genes being traceable for essentially forever.

A "racist" approach like "when the person in question neither show it visually nor transfer the foregin traits any more" could work in a fictional universe?

I reject your reality and substitute my own!!!

Well, let's look at ligers and tigons. According to The Other Wiki, male ligers are sterile but the females aren't, while male tigons aren't but female tigons are; so, if you breed a male tigon and a female liger, you might get a new species that would (potentially) be fertile. Most other hybrids are absolutely sterile.

I don't think half-elves (or whatevers) should EVER be considered full elves. I mean, you might not LOOK like a part-human but you still ARE part-human and there's no way to breed that out of the lineage. It's like trying to turn gray into white - it's impossible.

Level 3 Social Justice Necromancer. Chaotic Good.

I have a Harry Potter fanfic set in the epilogue time period where Hagrid has a daughter with a full giantess (who didn't stick around to raise the kid and the relationship didn't last, and the kid ended up being adopted by wizards who were aware she was related to giants), which means their daughter is 3/4ths giantess and is even bigger than Hagrid but is still able to use magic so she's a Hogwarts student.

There is also a canon Harry Potter example of a character who is a descendant of a half-human hybrid, and that would be Fleur Delacour, whose mother is 1/2 veela, so Fleur is 1/4th veela.

edited 1st Dec '14 7:29:52 PM by Rainbow

I honestly don't think there's much point to using mathematical fractions when describing hybrids. It's wildly inaccurate.

Totally agree. Anything past -quater or at the very most -eight just seems meaningless.

I reject your reality and substitute my own!!!

Even those are meaningless. Genetic inheritance is not half-half; more like 99.999% common, plus 0.0005% from each parent.

Viewers Are Morons is not an excuse for not getting your numbers right.

I didn't know that. You learn something every day.

I reject your reality and substitute my own!!!

And many fertile female mules have been recorded.

For duty, duty, must be done, the rule applies to everyone;

If there wouldn't be so many identical genes, no two humans would look the same. And by that I don't mean stuff like hair color but fundamental biological differences like what hormone a gland produces or what chemical is lethally toxic to the body.

Even some apes are 95% identical to us genetically, to the point where some may be able to crossbreed with us (though the sheer physiological differences mean that the chance of the fetus being born live is extremely small). Yet they are still clearly not human. Now consider how identical humans have to be to each other in order to resemble each other so much, as opposed to being as different from each other as a human and a random species of ape. We're not tailor-made; we're template-based, with extremely minor customization. All life is.

And I actually underestimated the similarities in my above post. Counting with a population of seven billion and ignoring twins, any random human is only 0.0000000001% unique. Yes, you read that right: ten zeroes. That's how little the genetic difference between you and your neighbor can potentially be in a best-case scenario, even without being twins! Of course, it's impossible to tell the exact value, since the human DNA is absolutely gigantic and thus cannot be compared with perfect accuracy.

edited 2nd Dec '14 2:37:29 PM by amitakartok

Makes sense now that I think of it. An 50/50 inherintance of gene would have quickly diversified any species too much,bringing it to extinction.

edited 2nd Dec '14 2:45:35 PM by TheBorderPrince

I reject your reality and substitute my own!!!

I assume you mean without so many genes that we all have in common, so that the copy we inherit from either parent would be the same? Yeah, pretty much the definition of a species: enough in common that interbreeding is both possible and happens when in the same vicinity.

As to the original question: I've watched True Blood (based on the Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse novels), and Sookie is a long-line descended human/fairy hybrid, mostly human heritage with some fairy traits.

Yeah, that was what I meant.

I guess the conclusion of this discussion is then that if a crossbreeding has been done can it NEVER be undone naturaly by just by trying to dilute the "strange" blood by waiting for X generations untill it reaces 0%. It will allways be at least some small fraction of an percent of those genes left.

You would have to resort to technology, magic, or something else to get rid of those genes...

I reject your reality and substitute my own!!!