10 Historical Facts You Should Know (But Probably Don’t)

6. Everyone Is Inbred And More Recently Than You Think

Most people assume we’re inbred to some extent, whether or not that be due to the Creationist ideas from Genesis in the Bible or evolution and the first humans to exist in Ethiopia but what many are surprised by is just how inbred humanity actually is.

There are a number of reasons for this but the two main ones are that your grandparents double each generation you could back and anyone who knows the story about the grain of rice doubling for each square on a chessboard will know; it doesn’t take long to count back and have more grandparents than people who have ever existed. The other reason is that some people are just very, very randy.

One of those people is Genghis Kahn who apparently fathered a ridiculous amount of children as he created his huge empire. It is difficult to know just know many women he slept with and how many people he created but one of the figures quoted is that he had about 500 ‘secondary wives’ and even far more children. These were not the children who were in line to inherit his enormous empire were nevertheless it is agreed that he had loads of kids both legitimate and illegitimate.

His randy antics mean that now about 35% of Mongol men share ‘Genghis Khan’ a chromosome which means over 1/3 of men in an entire nation can link themselves to this historic figure. Further to that though, it is estimated that around 1/200 men are related to Genghis today across the world which would make around 0.5% of men related to just one man who existed 800 years ago.

This may not sound impressive but just remember that this is just one man and that number increases more the closer you get to the Asian Steppe.