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
I looked it up some time ago because the whole popsci podcast-style “Ghengis Khan literally raping millions of women” thing doesn’t make any sense, and it’s mostly just a single study from 2003 full of conjecture and rumours, with huge asterisks everywhere. After all, **we don’t have his body to even get samples of his genetic material in the first place.**
Modern research doesn’t make any such claims and there has been some evidence contradicting this factoid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan#DNA_evidence
Genghis Khan died 800 years ago and had a lot of children. If each one of those went on to have a new generation every 40 years (way too high) then each individual child would be the ancestor of a little over 1,000,000 kids by now. That’s a conservative estimate. Now expand that by a shit ton and also assume that they produced new generations faster than 40 years.
Every living European is a descendant of Charlemagne and every other European who was his contemporary. You have two parents, four grandparents, 8 great-grandparents etc. That quickly blows up to more ancestors than there used to be people alive back then. The solution is incest, lots of incest, everybody is related to everybody else if you trace back far enough.
As far as I know it’s a pop culture myth loosely based on a paper. As pointed out by Jackmeister from r/Askhistorians who wrote an episode for K&G https://youtu.be/qrPnMEpOuNw
and this https://www.nature.com/articles/s41431-017-0012-3
the whole pop culture myth is bologne.
The og team found Mongolian populations had a particular gene in abundance (16 million by their estimate) and through somewhat shoddy unreliable methods concluded it arose in the 1000s ad thus to explain this rapid growth the claimed must be from the upper classes of Mongolian society. As the were previous examples of such happening in other societies as the upper classes don’t suffer from stuff like malnutrition, and have increased protection from stuff like random voilence etc so its like an evolutionary advantage almost especially in polygamous societes.
However as they had only random genetic samples from various populations with no way to distinguish between noble descendents with geneologies and random serfs and bannermen. They also made the really odd claim that the Hazara had an oral tradition of being the direct descendents of Chinggis Haan which they claimed proved it was common among the mongol elite. However no one else says the Hazara are such.
It should be noted they claimed he was himself a descendent and the gene spread more from higher per capita babies than any individual. However their dating is questionable as exhumed graves from as far back as the 500s BCE have the gene, the descendents of Chinggisid royalty and nobility with genealogies to prove it lack the gene entirely, and the gene is only found commonly in populations whose ancestors were poor commoners.
Thus it is the other way around the gene is an ancient mutation that spread slowly but steadily in the lower class populations of proto-Mongolic, mongolic peoples and those who mixed with them such as Turks, Central asian, etc populations. With much earlier steppe empires such as the Xioungnu, Gokturks, Avars etc spreading it long before Temujin was even born.
Genetic researchers are theorizing that he was the most prolific rapist of all time.
Not only did he rape very available woman, but they killed most men they captured.
There is a specific DNA marker for the Ghengis family. What they mean by that, its like if you copied the same typewritten page in secession dozens of times, soon you get random black spots here and there, you can still read the words on the page and the black spots don’t effect that, but each generation of copies will pass that black spot on.
Well the Ghengis black spot DNA marker is spread from Mongolia across russia, to the middle east and eastern europe.
While there may be other reasons this marker is so wide spread through this region, pretty much exactly where the mongols traveled across the continent, its believed he and his brothers raped dozens of women a day….then made sure there wasn’t much other source of DNA material.
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