1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan | Hacker News Reader

1 in 200 of men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan

blogs.discovermagazine.com

32 pointslionhearted29 comments

"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.

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The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols

http://web.unife.it/progetti/genetica/Giorgio/PDFfiles/ajhg2...

This 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.

Sorry that statistic seems completely impossible -- how would a man alive just before the roman republic became an ancestor to the Gauls (whom the Romans wouldn't discover for quite some time) let alone the American Indians?

They probably wouldn't no. However he's talking about humans alive today. Whilst I'm not really keen on this distant ancestral concept due to it essentially being a statistical trick, it's not unreasonable to assume that the descendants of Gauls/etc would have married someone in that descendancy tree, somewhere along the way.

The place this really falls down would probably be extremely isolated tribes which have had little if any external contact - there's very few nowadays, but some are remote enough that no pairing has probably happened.

All people alive today, not all people ever. The article cited[1] quotes indigenous populations in North and South America dropping by 97% and 93% before 1570— in the centuries since, it has become statistically improbable that any Native Americans descendants exist who don't share a European ancestor with you.

Now it comes from a computer model, so there could be errors or exceptions— I'm thinking extant uncontacted peoples, here. The model accounted for this possibility, as the paper notes: ...in order for a remote island to affect the MRCA date, it must have been colonized prior to the lineage of the mainland MRCA reaching the source population and it must have remained genetically isolated until very re- cently in order for there to be surviving people with no modern mainland ancestry.

Remember that uncontacted peoples are uncontacted by us; the ones we know of have regular if infrequent contact with other tribes, so if contacted tribes share the MRCA it's quite probable that uncontacted ones do as well. Could there be a cache of 50-100 human beings somewhere on this planet who happen to share an MRCA with us who is older than the one shared by all other living persons, maybe 10,000 years? Sure. But they would be the only ones out of 7 billion.

[1] http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf

Reading this comment, I thought that the 2,000 to 5,000 year claim was complete rubbish. Turns out that it's not, which is a bit surprising - it's supported solely by computer models at this point, not genetic evidence, and is probably contradicted by groups that were not interbreeding at the right times, but still.

http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf

I 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?

The obvious one is a difference in branching factor. Women can have ten children, and I would expect many more men than women die childless (not only because more than half of all newborns are male)

I remember reading a long article/blog entry once, and it claimed that we living humans are descended from 80% of all the women who ever lived but only 40% of all the men.

Haven't been able to find it again, though.

Hrm, this may help you / someone else get closer. This also relates to the 2,000 - 5,000 year subject: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.62....

from Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=all+living+hum...

It'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.

Side question brought on by the headline: Is there such a thing as an "indirect descendant?" Seems like all descendants are direct.

Yep, there are "indirect descendants". If X is a direct descendant of Y's sister (or other sibling), then X is an indirect descendant of Y. Doesn't make much sense, and it's hardly ever used, but there you go.

Another reason to say "direct descendant" instead of just "descendant" is that it makes it clear that there's a blood relation.

The point being that after a while, everyone is related from a mixed lineage, but male-only or female-only lines may die off, either a man having only daughters or a woman having only sons, or having no children at all.

And it makes a big diference— as I mention below, our most recent common ancestor is probably only 2~5,000 years old. However, genetic testing puts the age of our most recent patrilineal ancestor ("Y-chromosomal Adam", the one man every man alive now can say was his father's father's father's father's...) at more than 60,000, possibly 140,000 years old, and our most recent matrilineal ancestor ("mitochondrial Eve", the one woman etc.) is ~200,000 years old.

Douglas Adams had something to say about this.

"Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little fur hats.

"...Mr Prosser's mouth opened and closed a couple of times while his mind was for a moment filled with inexplicable but terribly attractive visions of Arthur Dent's house being consumed with fire and Arthur himself running screaming from the blazing ruin with at least three hefty spears protruding from his back. Mr Prosser was often bothered with visions like these and they made him feel very nervous. He stuttered for a moment and then pulled himself together.

"...He saw the bulldozer driver's union representative approaching and let his head sink back and closed his eyes. He was trying to marshal his arguments for proving that he did not now constitute a mental health hazard himself. He was far from certain about this - his mind seemed to be full of noise, horses, smoke, and the stench of blood. This always happened when he felt miserable and put upon, and he had never been able to explain it to himself. In a high dimension of which we know nothing the mighty Khan bellowed with rage, but Mr Prosser only trembled slightly and whimpered. He began to fell little pricks of water behind the eyelids. Bureaucratic cock-ups, angry men lying in the mud, indecipherable strangers handing out inexplicable humiliations and an unidentified army of horsemen laughing at him in his head - what a day."

(Hitchhikers chapter 1)

What 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.

If you are interested in DNA and haven't tested your own Y/mt-DNA, I highly recommend getting it tested (e.g. FamilyTreeDNA) and finding out a little bit more about yourself.

"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)

I've recently read that about every second western european male is somehow a descendant of the egyptian pharaoh Tutenchamun. I actually lived right next to the labs of a company where you can get yourself tested for that specific gene (and all other sorts of DNA related tests).

I guess then it is not too uncommon to have some genetic relation to any kind of people if they've lived many hundreds of years ago.

Also, 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.

Well, if it was only 2000 women, and he was doing it during his entirely 21 year reign, then he was only sleeping with a new woman on average a little bit less than every 4 days.

I 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.

The ideal lifestyle if life was perfect would be that of Genghis Khan. There'd be no use for religion, spirituality, philosophy, etc. All of philosophy stems from "I can't have everything that I want, so...". But if you can have everything you want: endless supply of women.. then life is all grand. You conquer, You win, You build, you get endless orgasms. No need to master your emotions and deal with unfairness.

Also an endless number of people trying to kill you. Not to mention that - while Genghis Khan's religion isn't known - it was probably either Shamanism or Tengriism, and he was "interested in learning philosophical and moral lessons from other religions. To do so, he consulted Buddhist monks, Muslims, Christian missionaries, and the Taoist monk Qiu Chuji."[1] So you're operating under an "idealized" view of his life. And that's without even getting into the misogyny that your opinion reveals.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan#Religion

Sure, it's ideal if you avoid all the pillaging, burning, raping, death and so on and so forth. Do get your point, but I think it's a little ... erm, disturbing.

This is "come up with a ridiculous theory" season. Enjoy!

This is actually a pretty well accepted theory that's been around for a while.

Yes, really?

What makes you want to believe that?

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