At Least Ten Other Men Could Rival Genghis Khan's Genetic Legacy _ IFLScience
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Transcript of At Least Ten Other Men Could Rival Genghis Khan's Genetic Legacy _ IFLScience
At Least Ten Other Men Could Rival Genghis Khan's GeneticLegacy
Health and Medicine
January 29, 2015 | by Janet Fang
As many as 0.5 percent of the world’s male population could be descendants of Genghis Khan, thefamously fertile warrior who ruled Mongolia over 700 years ago. These 16 million or so men havenearly identical Ychromosome sequences. Turns out, there are at least 10 other men who couldrival Khan’s genetic legacy, according to a new study published in the European Journal of HumanGenetics.
Previous work have identified two other similarly virile founding fathers: Giocangga, whosegrandson founded the Qing dynasty in China in the 1600s, and a member of the Irish early medieval‘Uí Néill’ dynasty. “Lots of men have lots of sons, by chance. But what normally doesn’t happen isthe sons have a high probability of having lots of sons themselves,” University of Leicester’s MarkJobling tells Nature. “You have to have a reinforcing effect.” For example, systems where"prestigious" men father lots children with many women.
To see if additional successful Ylineage expansions can be identified, a team led by Jobling andPatricia Balaresque from CNRS/Université Paul Sabatier analyzed a total of 5,321 DNA samplesfrom 127 Asian populations between the Middle East and Korea: They collected 461 samples fromcentral Asia and the other 4,860 came from previously published sets. By looking at theaccumulated DNA differences in shared sequences, the team was able to figure out when thefounder of a lineage lived. And with a few assumptions about where their descendants might havemoved over time, the researchers were able to track the geographic origins of these lineages.
Of course, the Ychromosome lineages of Genghis Khan and Giocangga stood out—and so did nineothers, though their identities are unknown right now. Altogether, the descent clusters derived fromthese 11 founding chromosomes represent 38 percent of the Ychromosomes analyzed. These newlyuncovered, highly represented lineages originated throughout the Asian continent—in bothagricultural and nomadic cultures from the Middle East to southeast Asia—and their expansionsbegan between 2100 BC and 1100 AD.
[Via Nature]
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