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
They actually don’t.
They found A common ancestor in the DNA evidence and presumed it was Genghis Khan, because he’s someone who would have been in the opportunity to with how much he moved around and how much of a womanizer he was known to be.
Scholars now believe they may have been mistaken.
Without finding his body or for sure known descendants they can’t know for sure. Because his burial site is kept such a mystery, we likely will never know for sure.
You are correct
The claim is based on the discovery of a specific Y-chromosome lineage that is found in a large number of men across a wide geographic area, primarily in Central Asia. Y-chromosomes are passed almost unchanged from father to son, which means that men who share this Y-chromosome likely share a common male ancestor….
They can’t say with certainty that this Y-chromosome belonged to Genghis Khan himself because, as you mentioned, his body has not been found and his DNA has not been directly tested….
All posts that say they have found DNA evidence of common ancestor that is presumed to be Gengis Khan is just wrong and spreading misinformation. The common ancestor is not Gengis Khan, but a descendant of Gengis Khan. Obviously the common ancestor is still a descendant of Gengis Khan so it is not wrong to say a large number of human descended from Gengis Khan
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
The thing about that fun fact about Ghengis Kahn is that pretty much a time from his time who has any living descendents at all would have about as many as he did. As you go back in your family tree you have exponentially more grandparents at every generation back, but there are also generally speaking fewer people as you back in history. Go far enough back and any currently extant blood lines are just crossing over the same people over and over again. Kahn isn’t so far back that it’s literally everyone on the continent whose family trees (but it might not be that much further back either) but it’s likely anyone from his time ore slightly further back would have about as many living descents of thru have any at all.
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
I recently watched this video from SciShow. It does a great job of answering your question specifically. Check it out.
“Everyone Was Wrong about Ghengis Khan” https://youtu.be/qpuQCGuI41Y
We never found his body as all the people who attended his secret funeral were killed and those who killed his funeral goers were also killed not to mention it’s a unmarked grave
this is a fun video explaining this topic very well (scishow) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpuQCGuI41Y&pp=ygUSaGFuayBncmVlbiBnZW5naGlz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpuQCGuI41Y&pp=ygUSaGFuayBncmVlbiBnZW5naGlz)
They don’t. There is no proof it’s him. It could be anyone that was in his army and we’ll never know. They might not have been in his army even. They weren’t always the biggest on consent so it could have been anyone, even a roving band of thieves.
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