

1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan - lionhearted
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-direct-descendants-of-genghis-khan/

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pella
"DNA evidence - The Ian Ashworth Effect"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan#DNA_e...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan#DNA_evidence_-
_The_Ian_Ashworth_Effect)

 _Zerjal et al. [2003] [6] identified a Y-chromosomal lineage present in about
8% of the men in a large region of Asia (about 0.5% of the men in the world).
The paper suggests that the pattern of variation within the lineage is
consistent with a hypothesis that it originated in Mongolia about 1,000 years
ago (thus several generations prior to the birth of Genghis). Such a spread
would be too rapid to have occurred by genetic drift, and must therefore be
the result of selection. The authors propose that the lineage is carried by
likely male-line descendants of Genghis Khan and his close male relatives, and
that it has spread through social selection. Both due to the power that Khan
and his direct descendants held and a society which allowed one man to have
many children through having multiple wives and widespread rape in conquered
cities.[7] According to Family Tree DNA, Genghis Khan is believed to have
belonged to Haplogroup C3._

\-- * --

The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols

[http://web.unife.it/progetti/genetica/Giorgio/PDFfiles/ajhg2...](http://web.unife.it/progetti/genetica/Giorgio/PDFfiles/ajhg2003.pdf)

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Cushman
This is not as surprising as it might seem, and in fact is more of a
statistical trick than anything else— according to Wiki, the most recent
common ancestor of all humans alive today is believed to have lived only
2~5,000 years ago.

Of course Genghis Khan was unusually prolific, and the direct patrilineal
aspect is what makes it special, but you don't have to go far back in time to
find an ancestor you share with one in ten people, let alone one in a hundred.

~~~
tomjen3
Sorry that statistic seems completely impossible -- how would a man alive just
before the roman republic became an ancestor to the Gauls (whom the Romans
wouldn't discover for quite some time) let alone the American Indians?

~~~
Cushman
All people alive _today_ , not all people ever. The article cited[1] quotes
indigenous populations in North and South America dropping by 97% and 93%
before 1570— in the centuries since, it has become statistically improbable
that any Native Americans descendants exist who don't share a European
ancestor with you.

Now it comes from a computer model, so there could be errors or exceptions—
I'm thinking extant uncontacted peoples, here. The model accounted for this
possibility, as the paper notes: _...in order for a remote island to affect
the MRCA date, it must have been colonized prior to the lineage of the
mainland MRCA reaching the source population and it must have remained
genetically isolated until very re- cently in order for there to be surviving
people with no modern mainland ancestry._

Remember that uncontacted peoples are uncontacted by _us_ ; the ones we know
of have regular if infrequent contact with other tribes, so if contacted
tribes share the MRCA it's quite probable that uncontacted ones do as well.
Could there be a cache of 50-100 human beings somewhere on this planet who
happen to share an MRCA with us who is older than the one shared by all other
living persons, maybe 10,000 years? Sure. But they would be the only ones out
of 7 billion.

[1] <http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf>

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iwwr
I wonder what the degree of relatedness (assuming inbreeding) these
descendants actually have with Genghis Khan. We know that family trees break
down into direct acyclic graphs over the longer term.

Note that the title assumes just patrilinear descent, so any man that may have
had only daughters will not pass on the Y chromosome, though he will still
have a non-patrilinear lineage (carried by both sons and daughters).

BTW, what are the main structural differences between strictly male and
strictly female lineages?

~~~
Someone
The obvious one is a difference in branching factor. Women can have ten
children, and I would expect many more men than women die childless (not only
because more than half of all newborns are male)

~~~
jodrellblank
I remember reading a long article/blog entry once, and it claimed that we
living humans are descended from 80% of all the women who ever lived but only
40% of all the men.

Haven't been able to find it again, though.

~~~
salemh
Hrm, this may help you / someone else get closer. This also relates to the
2,000 - 5,000 year subject:
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.62....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.62.1570&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

from Google Scholar:
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=all+living+hum...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=all+living+humans+are+descended+from+80%25+of+all+the+women&btnG=Search&as_sdt=0%2C45&as_ylo=&as_vis=0)

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leilavc
It's worth noting here that this paper only looks at Kahn's direct descendants
through the male line of Genghis Kahn. I believe that the number of people
alive who are in any way related Genghis Kahn (through both matrilineal and
patrilineal lines) is a lot higher than 1 in 200.

------
ja2ke
Side question brought on by the headline: Is there such a thing as an
"indirect descendant?" Seems like all descendants are direct.

~~~
sorbus
Yep, there are "indirect descendants". If X is a direct descendant of Y's
sister (or other sibling), then X is an indirect descendant of Y. Doesn't make
much sense, and it's hardly ever used, but there you go.

Another reason to say "direct descendant" instead of just "descendant" is that
it makes it clear that there's a blood relation.

~~~
Cushman
And it makes a big diference— as I mention below, our most recent common
ancestor is probably only 2~5,000 years old. However, genetic testing puts the
age of our most recent patrilineal ancestor ("Y-chromosomal Adam", the one man
every man alive now can say was his father's father's father's father's...) at
more than 60,000, possibly 140,000 years old, and our most recent matrilineal
ancestor ("mitochondrial Eve", the one woman etc.) is ~200,000 years old.

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DennisP
Douglas Adams had something to say about this.

"Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-
based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and
shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't
know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though
intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had
no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L
Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a
predilection for little fur hats.

"...Mr Prosser's mouth opened and closed a couple of times while his mind was
for a moment filled with inexplicable but terribly attractive visions of
Arthur Dent's house being consumed with fire and Arthur himself running
screaming from the blazing ruin with at least three hefty spears protruding
from his back. Mr Prosser was often bothered with visions like these and they
made him feel very nervous. He stuttered for a moment and then pulled himself
together.

"...He saw the bulldozer driver's union representative approaching and let his
head sink back and closed his eyes. He was trying to marshal his arguments for
proving that he did not now constitute a mental health hazard himself. He was
far from certain about this - his mind seemed to be full of noise, horses,
smoke, and the stench of blood. This always happened when he felt miserable
and put upon, and he had never been able to explain it to himself. In a high
dimension of which we know nothing the mighty Khan bellowed with rage, but Mr
Prosser only trembled slightly and whimpered. He began to fell little pricks
of water behind the eyelids. Bureaucratic cock-ups, angry men lying in the
mud, indecipherable strangers handing out inexplicable humiliations and an
unidentified army of horsemen laughing at him in his head - what a day."

(Hitchhikers chapter 1)

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apaprocki
What is really annoying about articles like these is that they don't actually
tell you the Y-DNA haplotypes or SNPs in the phylogenic graph. Even if it
isn't cluttering up the main article it would be great to have as footnote
information for those of us who actually know our Y-DNA information.

Sure enough, by clicking through and getting to the real journal article, this
is the footnote that accompanies the graph which is duplicated in the Discover
article:

    
    
      Figure 1 - Median-joining network (Bandelt et al. 1999) 
      representing Y-chromosomal variation within haplogroup C*
      (xC3c). Chromosomes were typed with a minimum of 16 binary 
      markers (Qamar et al. 2002; Zerjal et al. 2002; our 
      unpublished observations), including RPS4Y and M48, to 
      deﬁne the lineage C*(xC3c) (Y-Chromosome-Consortium 2002), 
      also known as haplogroup 10, derived for RPS4Y and 
      ancestral for M48. Sixteen Y microsatellites were also 
      typed, but DYS19 was excluded from the network analysis 
      because it is duplicated in haplogroup C. The central star-
      cluster proﬁle is 10-16-25-10-11-13-14-12-11-11-11-12-8-10-
      10, for the loci DYS389I-DYS389b-DYS390-DYS391-DYS392-
      DYS393-DYS388-DYS425-DYS426-DYS434-DYS435-DYS436-DYS437-
      DYS438-DYS439. Circles represent lineages, area is 
      proportional to frequency, and color indicates population 
      of origin. Lines represent microsatellite mutational 
      differences.
    

If you are interested in DNA and haven't tested your own Y/mt-DNA, I highly
recommend getting it tested (e.g. FamilyTreeDNA) and finding out a little bit
more about yourself.

~~~
pella
_"According to Family Tree DNA, Genghis Khan is believed to have belonged to
Haplogroup C3."_

\----

 _"One particular haplotype within Haplogroup C3 has received a great deal of
attention for the possibility that it may represent direct patrilineal descent
from Genghis Khan."_ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_C3_(Y-DNA)>

------
config_yml
I've recently read that about every second western european male is somehow a
descendant of the egyptian pharaoh Tutenchamun. I actually lived right next to
the labs of a company where you can get yourself tested for that specific gene
(and all other sorts of DNA related tests).

I guess then it is not too uncommon to have some genetic relation to any kind
of people if they've lived many hundreds of years ago.

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dfischer
Also, I remember someone doing "math" on how many women Genghis Khan had to
sleep with everyday his life to reach the number he did (it was like 2,000
women wasn't it?) compared to his lifetime... I remember the number being
pretty ridiculous.

~~~
burgerbrain
Well, if it was only 2000 women, and he was doing it during his entirely 21
year reign, then he was only sleeping with a new woman on average a little bit
less than every 4 days.

------
dfischer
I remember reading a fact like 4% of China is related to Genghis Khan.
Considering the amount of people in China this statistic of 1:200 makes sense.

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Hisoka
The ideal lifestyle if life was perfect would be that of Genghis Khan. There'd
be no use for religion, spirituality, philosophy, etc. All of philosophy stems
from "I can't have everything that I want, so...". But if you can have
everything you want: endless supply of women.. then life is all grand. You
conquer, You win, You build, you get endless orgasms. No need to master your
emotions and deal with unfairness.

~~~
sorbus
Also an endless number of people trying to kill you. Not to mention that -
while Genghis Khan's religion isn't known - it was probably either Shamanism
or Tengriism, and he was "interested in learning philosophical and moral
lessons from other religions. To do so, he consulted Buddhist monks, Muslims,
Christian missionaries, and the Taoist monk Qiu Chuji."[1] So you're operating
under an "idealized" view of his life. And that's without even getting into
the misogyny that your opinion reveals.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan#Religion>

------
fakeer
This is "come up with a ridiculous theory" season. Enjoy!

~~~
sorbus
This is actually a pretty well accepted theory that's been around for a while.

~~~
fakeer
Yes, really?

