Concincidenally, in Jewish tradition, for a child to be able to claim that they are Jewish origin, they must show that they were birthed by a Jewish mother.LPC wrote:Famspear wrote:One problem with research based on the Y chromosome is that, in something like 5-10% of cases, the husband of the mother is not the father of the child. This can be the result of adultery, but also invasions or rapes. (Something like a third of all Europeans are related to Ghengis Khan.) So, if you're trying to trace the ancestry of social or religious groups, tracing the female line might be more accurate.
I went to an exhibit on Ghengis Khan in San Jose two weeks ago and saw an video interview with a Mongol geneticist that stated that roughly 30% of Asians shared the same Y-chromosome, which indicated descent from a common male ancestor roughly about 700 years ago. This led to a scholarly deduction that Ghenghis was the most likely culprit since his regime was responsible for high number of males being killed as well as his descendants deflowering the local women and flooding the gene pool. But there was no scientific proof that Ghenghis was the culprit, since we don't have Ghengis' DNA profile (one of the shortcomings of the Mongol Empire was their failure to invent test tubes and a method to preserve specimens until DNA could be discovered).
I did not see any thing at the exhibit that stated that Ghenghis was responsible for 30% of Europeans living today. Not to say that this is out of the realm of possibility, but Europe wasn't mentioned.