I’m not sure about the exact fraction of Asian people that have genetic indicators of being his descendants allegedly, but how are researchers determining that a “father” whose DNA they don’t have is the specific “father” of all these descendants? Are they doing the family tree inference from relatives’ DNA they have like the golden state killer? Or is it basically some guy from around Mongolia from around Khan’s time fathered this many descendants, so we assume it’s Khan because… he did most of the sexual assaulting? I get that he had lots of wives and historical records of around the time allege he had thousands of children (although I suspect without a detailed accounting, I.e. a guess), but you don’t have to be married to have a child and the mongols had no shortage of opportunities to make children with lots of women if they were on a military campaign. Why can’t it have been one of his generals? Why wouldn’t it be *more likely* to be one of his generals that he dispatched ahead of him on additional reconnaissance missions like Subutai?
In: Biology
It’s a controversial hypothesis repeated by the media again and again, or you can just call it fake news. The so-called genghis descendants are men with the Y-chromosome haplogroup C3*-Star Cluster found in central Asia, eastern Siberia, northern India and part of Northern China. Basically this Y-chromosome haplogroup is super common/widespread to start with and whether Genghis carried it or not wouldn’t affect anything we see today.
After sharing a most recent common ancestor with another haplogroup approximately 48,400 years before present, Haplogroup C3 is believed to have begun spreading approximately 34,000 years before present in eastern or central Asia. And Genghis Khan lived from 1206 to 1227, just 800 years ago. He had absolutely nothing to do with the origin of C3
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