The latest New Yorker magazine has a story about the Mongols, under Hulagu, sacking Baghdad back in 1257 A.D. There are some fun facts in the article such as that Genghis Khan was said to have had 500 wives and concubines. Chris Tyler-Smith, a geneticist at Oxford University, has done Y-chromosome studies and estimates that roughly 32 million people today are descended from Genghis Khan and his harem. Charity was not a big part of the Mongol system:
When anyone begged from [the Mongols], they replied, “Go, with God’s curse, for if he loved you as he loves me, he would have provided for you.”
No theodicy problem for Genghis and pals…
You might be able to trace some of those genes to the modern day Mongols, a violent Southern California motorcycle gang. There was an interview with Billy Queen, an undercover ATF agent on Fresh Air last week: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4618645
Phil,
Did you read the Unicorn tapestry article in the New Yorker a while back? The computation story is interesting, and I know that back in the 90’s the brothers were interested in sequencing stuff and computational chemisty. When they did find an academic home, Craig Venter was one of the folks who they invited to give a talk.
Apropos mjo’s observation, there’s also a National Geographic project to gather tons of DNA from all over the place and do the big traceback – heard a good talk by someone at Irvine, this may be old news, but there are these neat migration maps that people are developing that use some kind of DNA proximity analysis to watch our species ooze around the planet – when we were very young.
Toodles
-BobP
Hmmm … I guess I didn’t add, just got a chance to reread what I had written. Good feature, or something that will cut down on some of the nifty not to well thought out comments that are fresh and sometimes very informative.
May this add it both, or am I in a loop?
It’s a wise man who knows his own father.
No G Kahn DNA, pure speculation, might be inbreeding for all we know.
If Mongolia could track down all their descendents of Genghis Khan, they could probably make a decent amount of money, exporting sperm and eggs, so your IVF baby could carry his DNA.