One way to overcome your own mortality is to produce a dynasty. A thriving flock of descendants can sustain themselves, generation after generation, passing down your name ... or at least your DNA. That's what Genghis Khan did, and did with astonishing success. An estimated 16 million men today, plus an uncounted number of women, are his direct descendants.
Khan's great flock came to light in a survey of DNA. When we pass down our genes to our children, they also inherit some distinctive genetic markers. Over the past 20 years, scientists have learned how to recognize these markers and use them to study human history. For example, the markers preserve a record of the spread of our species out of Africa some 50,000 years ago.
Geneticists have also used genetic markers to learn more about the ancestry of people in particular parts of the world. Genghis Khan's genetic achievements turned up in a study in which an international team analyzed the DNA of 2,123 men from Asia. Why just men? Because, unlike other chromosomes, the Y chromosome carried by each man is usually a carbon copy of his father's. (Other chromosomes come in pairs, and they get scrambled before we inherit them from our parents.)
In their survey of Asian men, the geneticists discovered one particularly remarkable genetic marker. It turned up in men in a vast region stretching from China across Mongolia and as far west as Uzbekistan. Eight percent of the men in that region carried it. Beyond those borders, they found the marker in just half a percent of Asian men. Closer study revealed that this marker probably originated in Mongolia roughly 1,000 years ago, plus or minus three centuries.
All of these lines of evidence pointed the geneticists to a dramatic conclusion: the men who carry this particular marker are all descended from Genghis Khan.
Khan was born around 1162 in Mongolia, and in his forties he began a campaign of conquest, ultimately creating an empire stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific. Khan had a great many children, both with his wives and with other women. His sons, who expanded the Mongol Empire into Europe, had many children of their own. Although the empire broke up in the decades following Khan's death in 1227, his male descendants ruled large chunks of it for centuries. And like their ancestor, they had many children as well.
If the geneticists are right, Khan and his descendants spread his distinctive Y chromosome to about half a percent of the world's male population alive today, or some 16 million men.
-FORBES.
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