Thread: 1 in 200 men today are related to Genghis Khan

Watching the History Channel today, I learned this fact and gave it a google.

I've quoted the 2 main parts, but it's worth reading the whole lot, here... http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com...he-march/?_r=0

An international team of geneticists conducting a 10-year study of men living in what once was the Mongolian empire has discovered that a surprisingly large number share the identical Y chromosome, which is passed down only from father to son. One individual’s Y chromosome can be found in 16 million men in Asia, from Manchuria, near the Sea of Japan, to Uzbekistan and Afghanistan in Central Asia.

The likeliest candidate is Genghis Khan, a warlord who raped and pillaged one town after another, killing all the men and impregnating the women, sowing his seed from China to eastern Europe. Though legend credits Genghis Khan with many wives and offspring, he didn’t need to do all the begetting himself to ensure that his genes would flourish. His sons inherited the identical Y chromosome from him, as did their sons and their sons’ sons down a long, winding Silk Road of legitimate and illegitimate progeny.

His equally warlike oldest son, Tushi, had 40 legitimate sons (and who knows how many misbegotten), and his grandson Kublai Khan, who figured so large in Marco Polo’s life, had 22 sons. Their genes scattered exponentially in an ever widening fan, and the process really picked up speed in the 20th century, when cars, trains and airplanes began propelling genes around the planet and stretching the idea of “courting distance,” which used to be only 12 miles — how far a man could ride on horseback to visit his sweetheart and return home the same day. Now it’s commonplace to have children with someone from thousands of miles, even half a world, away.

Khan wasn’t trying to create a world in his image; his fiercest instincts had a mind of their own, and his savage personality spurred them on. Most people don’t run amok on murderous sprees, thank heavens, but history is awash with Khan-like wars and mayhem. In their wake, gene pools often change. One can only surmise that wiping out the genes of others and planting your own (what we call genocide) must come naturally to our kind, as it does to some other animals, from ants to lions.

It then went on to talk about the Nazis and all sorts of things they were doing to fuck with genetics...

Except once. During World War II, Hitler and his henchmen devised an agenda, both political and genetic, that was nothing less than the Nazification of nature. The human cost is well known: the extermination of millions while, in baby farms scattered around Europe, robust SS men and blond, blue-eyed women produced thousands of babies to use as seed stock for Hitler’s new master race. What’s little known is that their scheme for redesigning nature didn’t stop with people. The best soldiers needed to eat the best food, which Nazi biology argued could grow only from the purest of seeds. So using eugenics, a method of breeding to emphasize specific traits, the Nazis hoped to invade the genetic spirals of evolution, seize control and replace “unfit” foreign crops and livestock with pure ones.

To that end, they created an SS commando unit for botanical collection, which was ordered to raid the world’s botanical gardens and institutes and steal the best specimens. Starting with Poland, they planned on using slave labor to drain about 100,000 square miles of wetlands. Draining the marshes might well have lowered the water table and created a dust bowl, and it would certainly have killed the habitat of wolves, geese, wild boar and many other native species, but despoilers rarely see downstream from events.

Elsewhere, the Nazis proposed planting forests to sweeten the climate so that it was more favorable for their own crops, and they spoke openly about reshaping the landscape to better suit Nazi ideals. That revision included people, railways, animals and land alike, even the geometry of farm fields (no acute angles below 70 degrees) and the alignment of trees and shrubs (only on north-south or east-west axes). It’s bone-chilling how close they came to a feat of genetic domination that dwarfs all of Genghis Khan’s exploits.

The best soldiers needed to eat the best food, which Nazi biology argued could grow only from the purest of seeds. So using eugenics, a method of breeding to emphasize specific traits, the Nazis hoped to invade the genetic spirals of evolution, seize control and replace “unfit” foreign crops and livestock with pure ones.

To that end, they created an SS commando unit for botanical collection, which was ordered to raid the world’s botanical gardens and institutes and steal the best specimens. Starting with Poland, they planned on using slave labor to drain about 100,000 square miles of wetlands. Draining the marshes might well have lowered the water table and created a dust bowl, and it would certainly have killed the habitat of wolves, geese, wild boar and many other native species, but despoilers rarely see downstream from events.

Elsewhere, the Nazis proposed planting forests to sweeten the climate so that it was more favorable for their own crops, and they spoke openly about reshaping the landscape to better suit Nazi ideals. That revision included people, railways, animals and land alike, even the geometry of farm fields (no acute angles below 70 degrees) and the alignment of trees and shrubs (only on north-south or east-west axes). It’s bone-chilling how close they came to a feat of genetic domination that dwarfs all of Genghis Khan’s exploits.

Oh my. Even seemingly innocent stuff like breeding better crops and livestock sounds ominous when done by nazis. Please point out that Hitler was the first one to ban smoking, therefore smoking is good for you.

And for the upper part of this article, let's see what the maths say. Gengis lived about 40 generations ago, if he had only two kids, and each of them two kids again, and again for 40 generations, we would have 1.1 trillion descendants of Genghis Khan now. Or each of the 7 billion alive have his DNA recrossed into the family tree hundreds of times. So yes he was a prolific breeder and so were his sons and grandsons, but many events since have erased his DNA also.