Does Genghis Khan have a rival as History's Greatest Lover?

The only time I scooped Nicholas Wade, the NYT's ace genetics reporter, was on the story that Y-chromosome analysis showed that Genghis Khan was the ancestor in the direct male line of one out of every 200 men on earth, making him roughly 800,000 times more fecund than the average man alive 800 years ago. Now, we have a new (collective) candidate: the Manchu kings that founded the last dynasty in China, the Qing.

Yali Xue, Chris Tyler-Smith (whom I interviewed for the Genghis Khan story), et al, have a new paper entitled "Recent Spread of a Y-Chromosomal Lineage in Northern China and Mongolia" in the new American Journal of Human Genetics. Here's the abstract:

We have identified a Y-chromosomal lineage that is unusually frequent in northeastern China and Mongolia, in which a haplotype cluster defined by 15 Y short tandem repeats was carried by 3.3% of the males sampled from East Asia. The most recent common ancestor of this lineage lived 590 +- 340 years ago (mean = SD), and it was detected in Mongolians and six Chinese minority populations. We suggest that the lineage was spread by Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) nobility, who were a privileged elite sharing patrilineal descent from Giocangga (died 1582), the grandfather of Manchu leader Nurhaci, and whose documented members formed 0.4% of the minority population by the end of the dynasty.

They argue:

We reasoned that the events leading to the spread of this lineage might have been recorded in the historical record, as well as in the genetic record. The spread must have occurred after the cluster's TMRCA (~500 years ago, corresponding to about A.D. 1500) and, most likely, before the Xibe migration in 1764. Notable features are the occurrence of the lineage in seven different populations but its apparent absence from the most populous Chinese ethnic group, the Han. A major historical event took place in this part of the world during this period, namely, the Manchu conquest of China and the establishment of the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1912. This dynasty was founded by Nurhaci (1559 - 1626) and was dominated by the Qing imperial nobility, a hereditary class consisting of male-line descendants of Nurhaci's paternal grandfather, Giocangga (died 1582), with 180,000 official members by the end of the dynasty (Elliott 2001). The nobility were highly privileged; for example, a ninth-rank noble annually received ~11 kg of silver and 22,000 liters of rice and maintained many concubines.

I've emailed Tyler-Smith to find out if he believes that this lineage is even more common today than Genghis Khan's. If his sample of 1,003 East Asian men is representative of China's population (which is 1/5th of the world's), then 1/150th of all the men on Earth have the Y-chromosome of Manchu kings. Looking at his paper, however, it appears that his sample of 1,0003 East Asian men is not representative of China as a whole, but is biased in favor of the less densely populated far north of China. If so, then Genghis Khan is still the reigning heavyweight champion progenitor.

UPDATE: Chris Tyler-Smith emails to confirm that the Mighty Manslayer is still #1:

The Qing chromosome was not found at all in the Han samples we looked at, and this makes a big difference to predictions of its total number. If we make the assumption that its real frequency in the Minority populations is the same as our measurement (about 5%) and that it is really absent from the Han, the total number of carriers in the world would be a little over one and a half million, about one-tenth of the Genghis Khan chromosome. Still quite impressive for such a recent and relatively peaceful expansion.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer