I was just watching the Genghis Khan vs Easter Bunny Epic Rap Battle and one of the lines is something like "Now my DNA's in dudes from New York to Japan". Is there any sort of rough estimate of how many children Khan had in his lifetime? Because apparently it's a lot.
hi! assuming that the underlying question is "Is Genghis Khan/Charlemagne/William the Conqueror/whomever really the ancestor of x% of all Asians/Europeans/British/whomever?", then this comes up quite often in this sub, and the TL;DR is yes: broadly speaking, anyone who lived several hundred years ago and produced at least grandchildren is the ancestor of a great many people living today.
Here's the most recent post on this:
and see this one, which has a longer explanation of the math involved, plus links to several other posts
A couple of caveats when reading these threads, since comments are not always clear about what they are referring to:
"Descendants" are Genghis Khan's children's children's children's ... children. As a hypothetical example, imagine that after 2 generations he has 4 children (2 sons and 2 daughters), each of whom have 4 children (2 sons and 2 daughters): that's 4 + (4*4) = 20 descendants.
"Male-line descendants" are Genghis Khan's sons' sons' sons' ... sons only. Using the above example, after 2 generations he has 2 + (2*2) = 6 male-line descendants (that is, his two sons and their sons; his daughters, his sons' daughters, and his daughters' children are excluded). This is the group that Y-chromosome DNA evidence refers to (see next point).
Y-chromosome DNA evidence does not prove descent from him personally, but from people with genetic markers which he (may have?) shared