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
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.
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