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Ghenghis Khan Descendants Eat For Free

pillageplunder writes "CNN has an article about a London restaurant that is offering diners the chance to see if they are descended from the great Khan (Genghis that is). If you are, then you get a free meal. The article delves a bit into bioarchaeology, with some pretty interesting tidbits of info."

5 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. They are going to be giving out a lot of meals. by ikkonoishi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    6 billion to be exact.

    Due to the exponential nature of family trees anyone alive more than 600 years ago is everyone's ancestor in one way or another. (Ignoring massive inbreeding or closed cities.)

    1. Re:They are going to be giving out a lot of meals. by Ayaress · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Thanks to the Mongol lifestyle of burning cities and raping women, they could have spread their DNA much farther in a shorter period of time - still not enough to account for everybody having Mongol blood, let along the Khan's blood.

      I've seen guestimates that Khan may have gotten his y chromosome into as many as 1/3 of the Asian and Russian males alive today, as well as smaller fractions of the middle-eastern and European populations. I've never seen any hard figures to try to support this, but 30 generations isn't enough for one person to have a bloodline connection with everybody in the world - maybe if we had perfect worldwide random pairing in the gene pool, but some of us are still stuck over here in the shallow end.

  2. Re:Ashworth the Enlightened by sudog · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Ghenghis Khan and his immediate descendants did not savagely rape and pillage. They happened to set up one of the most civilised golden ages in history and invented the movable type press. Oh, you thought Gutenberg was The Man? No--he invented a mechanism for mass-producing books. The Mongols beat him to the basic press by decades and out of simple necessity!

    The Mongols designed a written language which was capable of forming all the syllables of their subjugated nations.

    Genghis was one of the first (and only) conquerors to allow his subjugated peoples to practice their own religions, spared and freed everyone who surrendered immediately, destroyed powerful nations (such as the Caliphate of what is now Iraq) as a result of barbarous behaviour visited upon his diplomats, was one of the only rulers ever to base promotion and reward *purely on merit* and not familial ties nor nobility, invented modern warfare and perfected siege technique, created tremendous surplus and prosperity and justice for all who lived inside the Mongol empire, and visited total destruction on all who refused to submit.

    Genghis Khan and his successors conquered more people, more land, with fewer warriors and in less time than anyone else ever has in recorded history. Alexander the Great was a gnat by comparison. Attila the Hun, a nobody. The Roman Empire, a blemish on the ass-cheeks of one of Genghis' concubines. Hitler killed fewer people and conquered less land--even with those death-camps and all the Schlieffen plans he wanted to dream up. Stalin was a punk-ass backstabber rat.

    Genghis could travel faster and further with 50,000 horse-mounted warriors, could defeat larger armies, and destroy or conquer countries better and with fewer Mongol casualties, than anyone else prior to or since.

    The only nation that Genghis' descendents failed spectacularly in conquering was Japan, and that was only because a nasty storm whipped up and destroyed their invading ships every single time they tried to take the islands.

    One of the more terrible things that came about from Genghis' subjugation of pretty much all of Asia and Europe was the Black Plague, the spread of which was facilitated by the active overland trade routes the Mongols built.

    The Mongols prized engineers, craftsman, and skilled workers above *all* others because of their unique abilities.

    The Mongols also forced advanced education on and provided health care and doctors to, their subjugated nations.

    Say what you will about them, they were the impetus which dredged us inexorably towards modern civilisation, kicking and screaming, and without whom we probably wouldn't be as advanced socially and technologically as we are today.

    Most of those savageries attributed to Genghis are simply lies: propaganda whipped up before the Mongols even arrived by jittery European scribes who bought into the pre-invasion panic the Mongols liked to sow.

  3. Re:no, hang on a second by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting
    The mongol hordes took their women.
    The mongol hordes took their mothers and sisters.
    The mongol hordes took their girlfriends.
    The mongol hordes took your girlfriend.

    Am I allowed to say "I have a girlfriend" or "My girlfriend's name is..."? Or would it imply that I own her?

  4. Re:Ashworth the Enlightened by sudog · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Since when did GW promote freedom of religion, universal health care, and promotion based solely on merit and not familial ties?