SOCIETY × GENETICS
The Mongol Empire
1206 CE
History · Middle Ages · Holocene · Meghalayan
The Mongol Empire, founded in 1206 when Temujin was proclaimed Genghis Khan, became within decades the largest contiguous land empire in history.
The Mongol Empire, constituted in 1206 at the proclamation of Temujin under the name Genghis Khan, becomes within a few decades the largest contiguous land empire in history, linking China to eastern Europe. Its organisation comprises a postal relay service, the circulation of armies and caravans and, by the same routes, the diffusion of pathogens. A Y-chromosome lineage carried by about one man in twelve across the area of the former empire was long attributed to it, and more precisely to the male descent of the khan; whole-chromosome sequencing relates it to ordinary Mongol clans, more than a millennium before him.
Why it matters
The Mongol century constitutes the first unified continental circuit for goods, techniques, ideas and infectious agents, the Black Death having travelled its routes. The genetic dossier further provides a methodological case: a spectacular attribution to a documented individual gives way, before more complete data, to the demographic explanation of a population expansion.
Dating & uncertainty
Temujin is proclaimed Genghis Khan in 1206, and the empire extends within two generations from Korea to Hungary. Dating a lineage proceeds from counting the mutations accumulated since its common ancestor, set against a known rate of accumulation, so that the extent of the sequence read determines the precision: the first studies bore on a few markers and provided only an order of magnitude, whereas reading the whole chromosome counts several hundred. So established, the lineage carried by about 8 per cent of men in the area considered goes back some 2,600 years, and no direct link with Genghis Khan is demonstrated.
Our species’ history as one day
23:56:153 min 45 s before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day