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
We don’t *know* he is. Not by DNA or anything
But Genghis Khan lived about 800 years ago. And we know he had at least 9 children
In 800 years there have been about 26 generations. If each of his children had 2 children, and they 2 children, and so on…
The math on that works out that millions of people would be descended from Genghis Khan. So that is where the idea that 1% of the population is a descendant of Genghis Khan
Latest Answers