1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan
blogs.discovermagazine.com
1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan
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Re: 1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan
#2I wonder what the degree of relatedness (assuming inbreeding) these descendants actually have with Genghis Khan. We know that family trees break down into direct acyclic graphs over the longer term.
Note that the title assumes just patrilinear descent, so any man that may have had only daughters will not pass on the Y chromosome, though he will still have a non-patrilinear lineage (carried by both sons and daughters).
BTW, what are the main structural differences between strictly male and strictly female lineages?
Re: 1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan
#3This is not as surprising as it might seem, and in fact is more of a statistical trick than anything else— according to Wiki, the most recent common ancestor of all humans alive today is believed to have lived only 2~5,000 years ago.
Of course Genghis Khan was unusually prolific, and the direct patrilineal aspect is what makes it special, but you don't have to go far back in time to find an ancestor you share with one in ten people, let alone one in a hundred.
Re: 1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan
#4I remember reading a fact like 4% of China is related to Genghis Khan. Considering the amount of people in China this statistic of 1:200 makes sense.
Re: 1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan
#5Also, I remember someone doing "math" on how many women Genghis Khan had to sleep with everyday his life to reach the number he did (it was like 2,000 women wasn't it?) compared to his lifetime... I remember the number being pretty ridiculous.
Re: 1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan
#6It's worth noting here that this paper only looks at Kahn's direct descendants through the male line of Genghis Kahn. I believe that the number of people alive who are in any way related Genghis Kahn (through both matrilineal and patrilineal lines) is a lot higher than 1 in 200.
Re: 1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan
#7What is really annoying about articles like these is that they don't actually tell you the Y-DNA haplotypes or SNPs in the phylogenic graph. Even if it isn't cluttering up the main article it would be great to have as footnote information for those of us who actually know our Y-DNA information.
Sure enough, by clicking through and getting to the real journal article, this is the footnote that accompanies the graph which is duplicated in the Discover article:
Figure 1 - Median-joining network (Bandelt et al. 1999)
representing Y-chromosomal variation within haplogroup C*
(xC3c). Chromosomes were typed with a minimum of 16 binary
markers (Qamar et al. 2002; Zerjal et al. 2002; our
unpublished observations), including RPS4Y and M48, to
define the lineage C*(xC3c) (Y-Chromosome-Consortium 2002),
also known as haplogroup 10, derived for RPS4Y and
ancestral for M48. Sixteen Y microsatellites were also
typed, but DYS19 was excluded from the network analysis
because it is duplicated in haplogroup C. The central star-
cluster profile is 10-16-25-10-11-13-14-12-11-11-11-12-8-10-
10, for the loci DYS389I-DYS389b-DYS390-DYS391-DYS392-
DYS393-DYS388-DYS425-DYS426-DYS434-DYS435-DYS436-DYS437-
DYS438-DYS439. Circles represent lineages, area is
proportional to frequency, and color indicates population
of origin. Lines represent microsatellite mutational
differences.
Re: 1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan
#8This is "come up with a ridiculous theory" season. Enjoy!
Re: 1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan
#9"DNA evidence - The Ian Ashworth Effect"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_Genghis_Khan#DNA_e...
Zerjal et al. [2003] [6] identified a Y-chromosomal lineage present in about 8% of the men in a large region of Asia (about 0.5% of the men in the world). The paper suggests that the pattern of variation within the lineage is consistent with a hypothesis that it originated in Mongolia about 1,000 years ago (thus several generations prior to the birth of Genghis). Such a spread would be too rapid to have occurred by genetic drift, and must therefore be the result of selection. The authors propose that the lineage is carried by likely male-line descendants of Genghis Khan and his close male relatives, and that it has spread through social selection. Both due to the power that Khan and his direct descendants held and a society which allowed one man to have many children through having multiple wives and widespread rape in conquered cities.[7] According to Family Tree DNA, Genghis Khan is believed to have belonged to Haplogroup C3.
-- * --
The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols
http://web.unife.it/progetti/genetica/Giorgio/PDFfiles/ajhg2...
Re: 1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan
#10What is really annoying about articles like these is that they don't actually tell you the Y-DNA haplotypes or SNPs in the phylogenic graph. Even if it isn't cluttering up the main article it would be great to have as footnote information for those of us who actually know our Y-DNA information. Sure enough, by clicking through and getting to the real journal article, this is the footnote that accompanies the graph wh…
"According to Family Tree DNA, Genghis Khan is believed to have belonged to Haplogroup C3."
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"One particular haplotype within Haplogroup C3 has received a great deal of attention for the possibility that it may represent direct patrilineal descent from Genghis Khan." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_C3_(Y-DNA)