There is a popular fun fact about the founder of the Mongol empire Chinggis khan, claiming that the
conqueror is the ancestor of more than 16 million men or 8% of the population of the wider region.
But is that true? In this video we will try to use modern genetic studies to deduce if
the great Khan was as prolific as the internet fun facts like to portray him.
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At the start of the twenty-first century, a study was released which brought the thirteenth
century starkly into the present. A 2003 study led by Chris Tyler-Smith
determined that an unusual number of men across Asia, from China to Uzbekistan, carried the same
haplotype on their Y-chromosome, indicating a shared paternal lineage. 8% of the studied group,
just over 2100 men, shared this haplotype, which if representative of the total world population,
would have come out to about 16 million men. This was far beyond what was to be expected of
standard genetic variation over such a vast area. The researchers traced the haplogroup to Mongolia,
and with the BATWING program determined that the most recent common ancestor lived approximately
1,000 years ago, plus or minus 300 years in either direction. The study determined that this could
only be the result of selective inheritance, and there was only man who fit the profile,
who had the opportunity to spread his genes across so much of Asia and have them be
continually selected for centuries to come; that was Chinggis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire.
Identifying him with the Y-Chromosome haplogroup, the C3* Star Cluster, the image of Chinggis Khan
as the ancestor of 0.5% of the world population has become irrevocably attached to his name,
and a common addition in the comment sections on any Mongol related topic on the internet
will be the fact that he is related to every 1 in 200 men in Asia today.
Yet, recent studies have demonstrated that this may not be the case,
and that Chinggis Khan’s genetic legacy is not so simple as commonly portrayed.
Inside each human being are the genes we inherit from our parents. Distinct
alleles within the thousands of genes of our 23 chromosomes affect the makeup of our bodies,
from our physical appearances to blood type. Each allele is inherited from our parents, who
inherited from their parents, and so on, leaving in each human being a small marker of every member
of their ancestry. Due to interbreeding and mixing over time, people living in a certain region
will share alleles, given that various members of their community shared ancestors at some points.
A collection of these alleles is a haplotype, and a group of similar haplotypes with shared ancestry
is a haplogroup. Tracing specific haplogroups attached to the Y-Chromosome, for instance,
allows us to trace paternal ancestry of selected persons. It was the haplogroup dubbed the C3*star
cluster that the researchers identified as Chinggis Khan’s haplotype, though later research
has redefined it to the C2* star cluster. Whoever carried the markers on their chromosome associated
with this haplogroup, according to the study, was therefore a descendant of Chinggis Khan.
The lineage, it should be noted, does not start with Chinggis Khan; it is detectable
in the ancestors of the Mongols dating back at least to the fifth century BCE, to the Donghu
people in eastern Mongolia and Manchuria. It is found in high frequencies in populations which
had close contact with Mongols from Siberia to Central Asia, as as the Buryats, Udeges,
Evens, Evenks, Kazakhs, and in lower frequencies in places conquered by the Mongol Empire.
The 2003 study found that 8% of the men sampled had high frequencies of haplotypes from a set of
closely related lineages, the C2* star cluster. With the highest numbers of this cluster found
in Mongolia, it was the logical origin point for this cluster. It’s frequencies in so many
populations of the former Mongol Empire seemed to suggest it spread with Mongol imperial expansion.
The researchers therefore identified Chinggis Khan and his close male-relatives as the likely
progenitors. While the public has understood this as Chinggis Khan and his family raping a massive
percentage of the thirteenth century human population, this was not quite what the study
implied. Rather, the selective marriage into the Chinggisid royal family, with each son having high
numbers of children, and so on for generations due to prestige associated with the lineage,
was the cause for the haplogroup’s spread. The study decided that, since the haplogroups
showed up in high frequencies among the Hazara of Afghanistan and Pakistan,
and as they were deemed to be direct descendants of Chinggis Khan, then this must have meant no
one else other than the Great Khan himself was the most recent common ancestor for this haplogroup.
The high frequencies across Asian populations, an origin point in Mongolia, an estimated common
ancestor approximately a thousand years ago, and association with the supposed Chinggisid Hazaras
was the extent of the evidence the study had to make Chinggis Khan the progenitor.
However, as more recent studies have demonstrated, there are a number of problems with this evidence.
Firstly, researchers have pointed out how indirect the evidence is for the connection of Chinggis
Khan to the linege. The estimates for the most recent common ancestor can vary widely depending
on the methods used; while some estimates can place a figure within Chinggis Khan’s epoch,
other estimates put the most recent common ancestor for the C2* cluster over 2,000 year ago,
while even the closer estimation method still has a margin of error that could
put the ancestor centuries before Chinggis Khan. One of the most serious assumptions in the study
was that the Hazara of Afghanistan were direct descendants of Chinggis Khan.
This is an assumption which rests more on misconception than medieval materials.
In fact, the thirteenth and fourteenth century sources indicate that Chinggis Khan spent only
a brief time in what is now Afghanistan, and not until the end of the thirteenth century
were Chinggisid princes actually staying in the region. The sources instead describe
waves of Mongol garrisons into Afghanistan which began almost a decade after Chinggis Khan’s death,
from initial tamma garrisons under Ögedai Khaan’s orders, to Jochid troops fleeing
Hulegu to Afghanistan in the 1260s. Together, this strongly suggests that the Hazara would not bear
Chinggisid ancestry in any considerable quantity. Perhaps most prominently, there is little evidence
to connect the C2* star cluster to known descendants of Chinggis Khan. The fact that no
tomb of Chinggis Khan or any other known members of his family has been found, means that there is
no conclusive means to prove his haplogroups. Without human remains which undeniably belong
to one of his close male relatives or himself, Chinggis Khan’s own haplogroup can not ever be
identified. Most royal Chinggisid lineages in the western half of the empire, such as that
of the Ilkhanate or Chagatais, disappeared long before the advance of genetic sciences.
In Mongolia itself, massacres of the royal family, such as by the Oirat leader Esen
Taishi in the fifteenth century and Soviet purges in the 1930s, have resulted in comparatively few
people today who can claim Chinggisid ancestry, and support it with genealogical data as well.
The 2003 study relied on a random selection of people from across Asia,
rather than looking specifically for individuals who claimed Chinggisid descent.
Other studies which have sought out people who claim Chinggisid ancestry do not support the
C2* Star cluster hypothesis of the 2003 study. A 2012 study by Batbayar and Sabitov of Mongolian
individuals who could trace their lineage back to Chinggis Khan’s fifteenth century descendant,
Dayan Khan, found none of them matched the Star cluster proposed by the 2003 study.
Burials of Mongolian nobility dating to the thirteenth century have had their surviving DNA
examined, which have always yielded alternative suggestions. One burial of extraordinarily wealthy
individuals from the early thirteenth century in what is now eastern Mongolia showed haplogroups
associated with western Eurasia, with effectively no descendants in modern Mongolian populations.
However, as none of these graves can be conclusively linked to be members of the
Chinggisid family, it remains speculative if these were not just wealthy generals
and members of the military elite, who bore no relation to Chinggis Khan.
Naturally, other wealthy burials have revealed differing chromosomal haplogroups,
providing no answer as of yet to the question of the Great Khan’s own genetic lineage.
Much like the 2003’s study erroneous connection of the Hazaras as direct descendants of Chinggis
Khan, a more recent study demonstrates the pitfalls of attempting to connect historical
figures to genetic data. A 2019 study by Shao-Qing Wen et al. looked at the y-chromosomal profiles of
a family from northwestern China who traced their ancestry back to Kölgen, a son of Chinggis Khan.
Importantly, this family also backed up their claims genealogical records, and
had maintained their place for centuries as they had been made local officials by the succeeding
Ming and Qing dynasties. This family, the Lu, not only did not match the C2* Star Cluster,
but actually showed close affinity to other known descendants of Chinggis Khan, the Töre clan
in Kazakhstan. The Töre trace their lineage to Jani Beg Khan, one of the founders of the Kazakh
Khanate, and a tenth generation descendant of Chinggis Khan’s first born son Jochi.
As the Lu family in China trace themselves to a different one of Chinggis Khan’s son,
the fact that the Lu and the Töre belong to the same haplogroup, with a genealogical separation
of about 1,000 years, suggests that if this is in fact the Y-chromosomal lineage of Chinggis Khan,
then Jochi’s uncertain paternity could be laid to rest, and that he was a true son of Chinggis Khan.
This theory is comfortable and convenient, but other scholars have noted that the connection
of the Lu to Toghan, the descendant of Kölgen, is very tenuous. The sources connecting the Lu
clan to Kölgen’s family were not compiled until the late Qing Dynasty, some 4-500 years after
Toghan’s death. The sources more contemporary to Toghan’s life do not match the description
of his life described in the histories used by the Lu clan, leading scholars to argue that,
while the Lu clan does have Mongolian origin, and likely did have an ancestor with the very common
medieval Mongolian name of Toghan, it seems likely that at some point the Lu clan’s family compilers
decided to associate their own ancestor with the more well known Chinggisid of the same name, and
therefore claim for themselves Chinggisid ancestry and prestige- hardly an unknown thing by compilers
of Chinese family trees. Therefore, the matter of Jochi’s paternity still remains uncertain.
Perhaps the final nail in the coffin comes in the 2018 study by Lan Hai-Wei, et al.
Compiling data from previous studies that found issue with the 2003 hypothesis,
they looked at groups with high frequencies of the C2* Star cluster like the Hazara or the Daur who,
based on historical records, have no Chinggisid descent. Newer estimates also suggest the most
recent common ancestor for this lineage was over 2,600 years ago. In the most recent hypothesis
then, it seems more likely that the star cluster does not represent the lineage of Chinggis
Khan, but was simply an incredibly common paternal lineage among ordinary inhabitants
of the Mongolian plateau. It’s presence in other peoples across Asia was not evidence of selective
breeding into the Golden Lineage, but simply the movement of Mongolian troops into a region,
and intermixing with the local population. In the case of the Hazaras, this is the exact scenario
demonstrated by the historical sources, with waves of Mongol troops rather than a host of Chinggisids
descending into the Hazarajat. The possibility cannot be excluded however, that while C2* was a
dominant haplotype in thirteenth century Mongolia, that before 1200 it had already been spread across
Central Asia by earlier nomadic expansions of Mongolia-based empires like the Göktürk
Khaghanates or the Uighur. The Mongol expansion in the thirteenth century, then, would only be
another wave of the spread of C2* across Eurasia. While it is possible that Chinggis Khan and his
close male relatives did in fact, carry the C2* star cluster, there is no evidence which
directly or conclusively connects him to it. His known descendants through the line of Dayan Khan
are of a different Y-chromosomal haplogroup. The descendants of Dayan Khan, himself a descendant of
Chinggis Khan’s grandson Khubilai, and the Kazakh Töre, descendants of Chinggis Khan’s son Jochi,
bear haplotypes so distant that their most recent common ancestor is estimated to have
lived 4,500 years ago, which does not fair well for the likelihood of Jochi being Chinggis’ son.
A third known and tested branch, of the Shibanids in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan,
does match the C2* star cluster, but has less than 1,000 known members and again,
are descended from Chinggis Khan via Jochi. Chinggis Khan then cannot be said to be the
ancestor of 0.5% of the world’s population, since his y-chromosomal marking remains unknown.
Any attempts at identifying it conclusively can never be more than mere assumptions
without finding the bodies of either the Khan or any of his close-male relatives-
a prospect highly unlikely, given the Chinggisids’ preference for secret graves.
Thus, it seems that his haplotypes are but one more secret that Chinggis will keep with him.
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