How is it that nearly 20% of all Asians are related to Ghengis Khan? I feel like they mean the mongols, but every article I read says Khan.
In: 1751
Ghengis Khan has 8 sons, Ghengis Kahn would force marriage upon the women of the villages he conquered either to himself or his military officers.
It multiplies very, very quickly…
Buddy, when they say Ghengis Khan, they MEAN Ghengis Khan.
Dude was a complete Warlord, who would walk into villages, murder every guy, and RAPE every single Woman there. No joke. And there wasnt exactly birth control or (safe) abortions back then, so the Women who got raped just… Had a kid.
If you get 20 Women pregnant in the first village, then 20 in the second, 20 in the third, so on so on through the THOUSANDS of villages you took over… Yeah its a LOT of kids, and those kids have kids, and those kids have more kids… It adds up…
Ghengis Khan had a lot of children, and he had them with a wide array of women over a wide geographic area. Not only that, but many of his children ended up in powerful positions that allowed them to have many of their own children. This resulted in his genetics being spread widely in several populations all over Asia.
The other comments point out that he had a lot of kids, which is true, but not actually as relevant here as you might think.
The thing is, this is actually true for literally anyone when you go back far enough. Pick a historical figure from wherever your ancestors lived and there’s a good chance you’re related to them.
Every generation back you go, the number of ancestors you have doubles. You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, 16 great grandparents. Clearly the further back in time you look, the larger your pool of ancestors is. You only need to go back 20 generations until you’ve got a million ancestors.
At the same time, the world population was much smaller. Back when Genghis was around, [the world population was less than half a billion.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population) Now we’re getting close to 8 billion. Clearly al lot of us are going to be sharing a lot of ancestors when you look back to the 13th century.
There’s a point in history called the[Identical Ancestors Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point), where anyone from that time who has surviving descendents is an ancestor of everyone alive.
Genghis isn’t that far back, but it demonstrates the point that he’s not actually that special.
We cannot test for how many people are descendants of one person. So it’s impossible that any scientific research ever said that 20% of Asians are descendants of Ghengis Khan. It’s something that people who like to invent things online like to say and repeat.
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As you may know, you have two parents and most likely have 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, 16 great-greats, 32 great-greatgreats…
If you keep doubling, then by 20 generation you will have about a million ancestors. Around 1200 A.D. is about 32 generations ago, so if you always had unique ancestors, you would have 4,294,967,296. As you may know, there weren’t that many people on the planet at that time, let alone in a region of the planet.
So what happens is that the ancestors’ tree collapses as people marry their cousins.
Now, on the other side of the equation, let’s say you had 2 children and they had 2 children and your grandchildren had 2 children. Then, in 32 generations, you would have 4,294,967,296 descendants related to you.
So it’s not really surprising that ghensis khan is related to so many people. What is surprising is that so many living people carry the same Y chromosome that he had. He wasn’t the first person to have that unique variant of y chromosome, but he was pretty close to when that y chromosome showed up. To have that many direct male descendants is much more surprising because it’s very easy for male lines (or female lines) to end.
It’s easier to see with last names. China has the oldest history with last names and, at one point, had about 12,000 different names; today, only a quarter of them are still in use. So that means 3/4 of the names didn’t have a male heir to continue the name. Although with last names, there can be more artificial factors, for example, sometimes families will change name based on emperor or simplify them. But the majority are gone because there weren’t male heirs. Also, what tends to happen if there is no artificial naming is that a few names become the dominant names. For example, the top 10 surnames are shared by 42.9% of the population. This is called Galton–Watson process if you want to look up more about it
It’s about 10% of Central Asian genes (not 20% of all Asians). Genghis was something of an organisational genius, or had thought about why previous nomad empires (Hsiung Nu, Turks at al) had quickly fallen apart. Instead of just enrolling tribes as subordinate units when he conquered them, he killed the old leadership, broke the tribe up into standard military units assigned to one or another of the army corps and appointed Mongol officers. The corps were under his sons, and major units under their sons and so on, but with the elimination of all other elite lines, a connection with Genghis became the standard marker of elite status. So marriage with Chinggisid daughters went with promotion, and Chinggisid descent monopolised higher level positions. Pretty much all the princes, chiefs and so on from Mongolia to the Crimea could claim some connection (and they were the ones with the most partners).
He slept with probably thousands of young women of high rank throughout Asia. Not only did he father a huge number of children, they were born to wealthy families that were likely to have many children in turn. Quite possibly he had the most children by far of anyone in human history.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-456789/Genghis-Khan-The-daddy-lovers.html
You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents. It doubles every generation. It doesn’t take many generations to run out of people to not be your relatives.
Using that basic math, you’d have almost 270 million ancestors from 29 generations ago, that’s about 600 years. That’s the same number of people there were on the whole planet that long ago. You might not want to think of the overlaps.
Khan was around 1200AD, so its not much of a stretch to say that in all likelihood, most people from that region probably have him somewhere in their family tree, at least once.
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