To quote the Khan,
"The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters."
A fascinating question really. My mother's family is from Poland and has lived there for at least the last five centuries. Given the difficulty of movement five centuries ago I think it likely that they have probably always lived there.
A fairly recent study of DNA in Europeans found some 16 milllion men with telltale markers that the researchers think are likely to belong to Genghis Khan's bloodline.
To quote one of the researchers,
"Virtually everybody today who lives near the Asian steppe must have Genghis Khan somewhere in his or her family tree."
I've joked with my mother for quite a while that she has Mongol in her blood--my sister has an epicanthic fold and we're all white Europeans.
Now if I could only find out how to have myself tested for the marker. Wouldn't that be something?
Posted by artandscience at February 17, 2004 07:57 AMThere was a story in England some time back about a project to determine if the modern inhabitants of the area were related to a neolithic skeleton found in the caves around Cheddar Gorge (he is of course known as "Cheddar George": stop that groaning . . . ).
It turned out that a local teacher was very close in his DNA makeup to the subject of the study.
http://www.peak.org/csfa/mt12-3.html#part8
Posted by: paul at February 17, 2004 03:04 PMI remember that. I think they determined that the inhabitants of a nearby village were likely to have lived there for a very long while and that's where they found the descendant. I'm off to read the article, thanks for the reference!
Posted by: stefan at February 17, 2004 04:35 PMSlight correction on the DNA Study involving Genghis Khan.
The 2,123 men were from Asia and were not Europeans.
There is no samples of the DNA of Genghis Khan only samples of men that supposedly claim from oral history that they are his descendants.
Posted by: richard at July 11, 2004 08:01 PMNo.. I aware that there aren't any samples of the Khan's DNA (his body was buried in a hidden grave somewhere on the steppes). The researchers are inferring that the common ancestor is Genghis Khan from the number of descendants and the fact that they all seem to descend from the same primogenitor.
Posted by: stefan at July 12, 2004 10:33 AM