Tuesday, June 06, 2006

The Great Khan's double entry bookkeeping! ("for entertainment purposes only")   posted by Razib @ 6/06/2006 12:22:00 AM
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It was bound to happen, the first European (American) has been discovered who is part of the lineage which is strongly suggestive of Genghis Khan. The man is an accountant. I assumed they checked and double checked the results, because they got only 1 hit out of 25,000 in the search for the Great White Khan. That there was only 1 hit out of 25,000, even if it isn't a mistake, is important, because remember that nearly 1 out of 10 "Central Asians" and perhaps 1 out of 200 men the world over are part of this Y chromosomal lineage (that is, father to son, father to son, father to son, and so on). The fact that so few Europeans are part of this lineage tells us that Genghiside paternal ancestry isn't magical, that the numerosity of the first few generations might not account for its subsequent distribution. Rather, my reading of the history suggests that a paternal line of descent from Genghis Khan carried great prestige in the Muslim world (ironic since he was a confirmed infidel), to the point where "Khan" became equivalent to "Caesar" (ie., "Czar," "Kaiser," etc.) in the Western world. This would have given this Y lineage success in because of social conditions (a drop of Genghiside ancestry conferring legitimacy to any upstart), but where those conditions did not hold (ie., the Khan name carried no aura of authority) it did not penetrate and spread.