Chibcha Khan didn’t have spend much time bring “married” to his concubines, so long as got sufficient opportunity to inseminate each of them. He wouldn’t even have to take too much trouble to ensure that some of them didn’t conceive from ther men. The numbers were in his favor.
No, you don’t really need much mire than approximately 500 sons, three or your of them which produced similar figures. With that start, you CSM just ride the odds like a wave, unless all those dons are on Mars sigh no zccess to yhe rest of humanity.
We’re really straying into GD territory, so I’ll just say that speculation on this point is not really appropriate for this forum. I will note, however, that you are making the assumption that it’s the man who is making the choice, and not the man’s family. While that may have been true of The Great Khan, your average guy married the woman (probably still a girl, actually) whom his relatives picked out for him. And that wasn’t just an Asian thing, either. This is how things worked in most of the world, including Europe, until relatively recent times.
If you’ve been raised with the expectation of one day having some unknown man show up to purchase you like a soda from a vending machine, willingness isn’t really going to vary. You don’t know who the man is. Of course you’ll hope that he’s nice and wealthy and all of that, but really until you get there and find out what your new life is like, there’s no way to know or care who it is that buys you.
back to Julius Caesar. In the 5th book in Colleen McColloughs “Masters of Rome” series, Julius Caesar is depicted as having the Queen of the Helvitii as his mistress while campaigning in “Long haired gaul” and as having a son by her named Orgetorix who would be King of the Helvitii.
Those books are renowned for their research and historical accuracy, did that son actually exist and if so can his line by traced? (The Helvetii were apparently the richest and most numerous Gaulish tribe of the time, there should be records of their kings I imagine).
There is an Orgetorix listed on Wikipedia but he was already king when Caesar was Consul so it can’t be the right one.
ah, in Colleen’s notes at end of book she states “some years after Caesar’s death a man from Gallia Comata turned up in Rome, claiming to be caesars son. According to the ancient sources he resembled Caesar physically.”
This is where she drew the character from, apparently this is recorded by 4th Century historian Ammianius.
Anyone with access to the sources know if more is recorded about happened to the man from Gallia Comata. I’d imagine he either got very rich or was killed by Caligula as a possible threat. Actually thinking about it he would probably have been killed by Augustus since it would be a threat to his position as Julius Caesars adoptive son and Augustus seems to have been pretty ruthless at purging when he came to power.
according to dictionary.com usage is commonly as you suggest however its technically correct the way I wrote it “adoptive” can refer to either the father or son in an adoptive relationship.
Although we’re deviating from OP (Jenghis Chan is no relation to Julius Caesar despite the identical initials) let me make a few more remarks.
Although born to Ghenghis’ wife, some make Jochi the product of a rape by another warlord! Leo van de Pas’ prestigious genealogical database shows Jochi with father unknown. Jochi has living agnatic descendants; I don’t know if these have been tested to confirm that they have “the Ghenghis Khan Y-chromosome.” (And, is it possible that the raping warlord was Ghenghis’ agnatic cousin anyway?)
It seems interesting that, although Ghenghis may have many millions of agnatic descendants, perhaps none (outside Jochi’s) is documented! Leo can de Pas has a wonderful website showing all male agnates in his database for Ghenghis and this line disappears with Ejei Khan, who forfeited the Mongol Empire to the Manchu Empire in 1635 AD.
This is in contrast to the Rurikid Dynasty which, despite losing its Empire after Ivan the Terrible, has documented living agnates (who caused some surprise when their DNA tests showed N-haplogroup).
Earlier I wrote “rape and harems” briefly, but the response shows I was over-brief. The rapine and harem concubinage were distinct but neither maps to sweet marriage. The harems were so vast that a given concubine might be serviced only once a year. The rapes often involved the brutal humiliation of defeated warriors. The idea that many of these impregnations resembled ordinary “marriage” is incompatible with the number of such impregnations required to produce the amazing “Ghenghis chromosome” statistic.
Jochi’s paternity was uncertain and its possible we may never know the truth. Temujin (Genghis Khan) acknowledged him as his son and that’s as far as we know.
Almost all of the Central Asian warlords and khans, as well as the various Persian shahs and Turkish sultans, had astonishing talents for paternity.
Some of the various Roman emperors also probably left behind illegitimate/unacknowledged progeny, who being born outside wedlock and/or being born to non-Roman mothers, were either unknown to them or not worth their father acknowledging. Caligula, for example, was alledged to have fathered the Pretorian prefect, Nymphidius Sabinus, on a slave girl, although some suggested that Nymphidius’ real father was a gladiator. This case is just a tantalizing glimpse, as there were likely many more illegitimate offspring running around the Imperial palaces, with Nymphidius Sabinus only being known to us because of the role he played in the reigns of Nero and Galba.
It is also not true that no genealogy records were kept before the Renaissance, or that those that exist are worthless. I refer you to The Henry Project, an exhaustive and scholarly study of the ancestry of King Henry II of England, for a glimpse at how historians and genealogists can piece together the ancestry of a medieval monarch. Of particular interest might be the page on Charlemagne, which has the best account of his many wives and concubines and various children that research may ever have devised.
The rapist who may have sired Jochi is known: Chilger of the Merkits. But most of the Khans (including Kublai made famous by Marco Polo) were descended from Jochi’s brothers (half-brothers?). Presumably the Guirey family has had their DNA tested – do they have the “Ghenghis chromosome”?
If one were to perform DNA tests to detect royal cuckoldings there are some interesting controversies much more recent than the 12th century… :dubious: :eek: :smack:
It isn’t a simple matter of mathematics. When I first read about Genghis Khan, I thought to myself: “How the heck do they know it’s Genghis Khan’s Y chromosome?” After doing a little research it turns out they don’t, really. National Geographic
To use this example as proof that Julius Caesar’s family’s genes (or anyone’s genes) HAVE to be spread throughout the population after a number of years is very deceptive.
“This is a clear example that culture plays a very big role in patterns of genetic variation and diversity in human populations,” said geneticist Spencer Wells, one of the 23 co-authors of the paper. “It’s the first documented case when human culture has caused a single genetic lineage to increase to such an enormous extent in just a few hundred years.”
This “Genghis Khan Y chromosome” example is not the norm, it’s the exception.
So you can’t use your mathematical formulas as the reason that EVERYONE must have the same ancestors going back only a few centuries. It isn’t enough. There are lots of royal lines that have completely died out. Many famous historical people have left no descendants.
All it would take is a culture that shuns someone who has married or been raped by someone outside the “village” to isolate a population. Looking at history, I would say that is more likely than your assertion that genes somehow spread throughout Europe, the Amazon, the Andaman Islands (take your pick) by osmosis. A child isn’t born just because you touched someone.
I contend that you could still find lots of “pure-blooded” natives in the Americas even today. Just because it’s a mathematical possibilty that someone could be descended from someone else, doesn’t prove it happened.
Even if you did have such a cultural norm, and maintained it for centuries, and it was so strictly enforced that nobody ever snuck out for a tryst with an outsider, it still wouldn’t be enough. If your isolationist society warred with their neighbors and captured/liberated (take your pick) women from the other tribe back home as slaves/trophies, then you’d still get fresh genes in that way.
Unfortunately for genealogists, there are some good reasons not to record the true biological parentage of illegitimate children. Angry husbands or fathers is one of them, as is the possibility that the woman might try to get child support from the biological father. Alternatively, it might be to a woman’s advantage to claim her child is the illegitimate child of a rich and famous person, even if that most likely isn’t true, because she could get more support from a rich man than from a poor man.
European Jews tried that. A lot of people with European Jewish ancestry don’t look all that different from other people with non-Jewish European ancestry. A lot of us Jews-by-choice can pass for born Jewish without much trouble. If that kind of isolation had worked, you wouldn’t expect that to be the case.
Such cultures don’t exist, at least in terms of avoiding marriage to those outside a single village. Any culture that did that would be doomed. Most cultures have customs in place that ensure a certain degree of outbreeding, by insisting that either women or men find mates outside of their clan/phratry/moiety. As Chronos points out, a common objective of intertribal warfare is to capture women who are then absorbed into the tribe; in some cases captives are taken as slaves but then later adopted into the tribe at some point, especially those taken as children. These practices ensure a certain degree of gene flow even between isolated groups.
That contention I think can only be based on a lack of familiarity with the history and culture of Amerindian groups since the Conquest. As I’ve mentioned, this history has been one of disruption and migration, not isolation over long periods in a single area. Even the most isolated groups are within a few hundred miles of groups with mixed ancestry, and this has been the case for hundreds of years. While it’s not possible to prove that a particular person has had no non-indigenous ancestors for the past 500 years, given the historical situation and cultural practices that is improbable.
I don’t think anyone in the thread represented the “Genghis Khan Y chromosome” as normal. To the contrary, it’s a consequence of the almost unbelievable extent to which the Khans accumulated harems and engaged in rape. And it still staggers (my) imagination.
Yet at the same time, the fact that almost every Central Asian must have Ghenghis in his pedigree hundreds of times does help build one’s confidence in the (surprising?) mathematical facts about common ancestors.
It’s very easy to confuse agnatic (patrilineal) descendant and (ordinary) descendant. Indeed the N.Y. Times article on the Genghis discovery several years ago got it wrong, writing something like “5% of Central Asians are descended from Ghenghis.”
I’m not sure which royal lines dying out you refer to. The Y-chromosomes of Clovis the Great and Charlemagne are extinct, as far as anyone knows, yet every European is descended from both of them.
BTW, at the Identical Ancestry point where X% of humans are ancestral to everyone living today, and (100-X)% of humans are ancestral to no one living today, can anyone estimate what X is?
You could probably find people who claimed to be “pure-blooded” whatevers, but the DNA evidence might tell another story altogether. If your society is prejudiced that members of the society are somehow better than outsiders (a common prejudice), then there are social reasons to claim that you’re a “pure” member of that society, no matter what your DNA might say.
Also, just because a society tries to keep itself separate from everybody else, doesn’t mean everybody else respects that wish. Other societies don’t always let an isolationist society be. You’d not only have to have an absolutely isolationist society with no way to join the group except by birth, you’d have to have all the societies it ever interacted with be willing to let that continue, or else unable to force it to change. And you’d have to have no woman in the society ever having sex with an outsider and passing the child off as the child of a man in the society, and no one in the society ever taking in children of outsiders and raising them as their own.
It is worth mentioning that even genetic analysis may not detect an ancestor who was a member of an outside group even a few hundred years ago. Going back 500 years, an individual has on the order of one million potential ancestors; it is quite likely that any genetic legacy from many of those ancestors will have been eliminated or undetectable by genetic analysis.
No, that’s not what happened in Europe, or elsewhere. What makes you think that the Jewish founder population shunned non-Jewish women? “Fiddler on the Roof”? That’s hardly a good depiction of what happened when the founder populations first moved to those areas in the Middle Ages or earlier.
There are always cases where your neighbor will not share any common ancestry with you, yet have several ancestors that appear more than once in his own family tree. Your assumption is that everyone mates with everyone equally.
There are lots of documented cases where famous people have left no descendants, I don’t know why this is in question. One famous example I just pulled out of a hat: Abraham Lincoln. His last descendant died in 1985. If famous people end up with no descendants, it’s even more likely that your hypothetical peasant encounter with Amazonian Indians isn’t going to leave any descendants, much less migrate sideways through Amazonia. At any rate it’s hardly guaranteed that in 500 years that EVERYONE has European ancestors.