Far fewer people are related to Genghis Khan than previously assumed, new genomic study suggests
Kazakh folklore has it that the body of Jochi, Genghis Khan’s eldest son, lies in a mausoleum in the Ulytau region of the country’s central highlands. When archaeologists recently studied the body of the medieval mausoleum, they did not find Jochi, but they did discover a new genetic lineage that may have been passed down from Genghis himself.
Genghis Khanborn Temüjin in the Khentii Mountains of northeastern Mongolia, was a Central Asian warrior who founded the vast kingdom of Mongolia. Mongol Empire in 1206. The Mongols’ astonishing equestrian abilities and skill with bows and arrows allowed them to quickly conquer territory stretching from the Pacific Ocean to central Europe. Genghis Khan and his wife Börte had four sons and five daughters. Their eldest son, Jochi, was born around 1182 and died around 1227, shortly before Genghis’s own death. The northwestern part of the Mongol Empire that Jochi (also spelled Joshi, Zhoshi, and Jüshi) ruled was later known as Golden Horde.
In an attempt to uncover the DNA of Genghis’ relatives, Askapuli and his colleagues investigated folklore claims that Jochi, who died after a fall from a horse in Ulytau, was buried in the eponymous mausoleum, built at least 70 years after his death. They published their results on February 19 in the journal PNAS.
For this study, researchers traveled to the Ulytau region and analyzed male skeletons from three medieval mausoleums believed to belong to Jochi and other elite men of the Golden Horde. The team examined the DNA to examine their Y chromosome data, which is passed down from father to son.
Two of the male skeletons have been carbon dated to between 1286 and 1398, making it unlikely that they are the children of Genghis Khan. But the researchers’ DNA analysis revealed that the two men shared a paternal lineage – also shared with a man carbon-dated to the 18th century – which is believed to be associated with Genghis Khan.
One problem with confirming this association, however, is that Genghis Khan’s skeleton has never been found and no one knows where he was buried. “No one knows exactly what their Y DNA would look like,” Askapuli said. “Not just him, but his sons, his grandsons, his immediate relatives – none of them are known. So this is an attempt to answer that question.”
A previous study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics in 2003 showed that an unusual Y chromosome lineage that originated in Mongolia a millennium ago, called C3*, is now common among people living in what was once the Mongol Empire. These researchers concluded that the lineage was probably carried by male descendants of Genghis Khan and that 0.5% of the current world male population, or 1 in 200 men, could be descended from the famous warrior.
In the new analysis, Askapuli and his colleagues found that the three men buried in the Golden Horde mausoleums were all paternally related and shared a recent ancestor in the C3* lineage.
“The Y chromosome haplotype they have is in the C3* group that was previously thought to be that of Genghis Khan,” Askapuli said, “but this one is very rare in modern populations.”
The C3* cluster is a very large genetic family – a fact that was not known in 2003. “It has many different branches,” Askapuli explained, “and the elites of the Golden Horde have one of those branches.”
The specific branch that researchers found in the mausoleum skeletons is actually much rarer than the one discovered in 2003, meaning that far fewer men living today are related to Genghis Khan than previously thought.
Scientists also found that individuals in Golden Horde mausoleums could trace their ancestry largely back to populations of ancient Northeast Asia (ANA), with genetic contributions from the Kipchaks, a group of Eastern Scythian nomads who lived in the Eurasian steppe and were integrated into the Golden Horde in medieval times.
Although the exact lineage of the Y chromosome that Genghis Khan shared with his male descendants is still unknown, Askapuli believes that in the near future, researchers may be able to answer this question.
“If we have a historically recorded grave and a tombstone indicating that this individual belonged to the descendants of Genghis Khan, and if we perform genetic testing on these individuals, I think it is possible to draw a definitive conclusion,” Askapuli said. “But it’s not a simple story, it’s complicated.”
Askapuli, A., Kanzawa-Kiriyama, H., Kakuda, T., Kassenali, A., Yessen, S., Schamiloglu, U., Schrodi, SJ, Hawks, J., and Saitou, N. (2026). Genomes of the Golden Horde elites and their implications for the rulers of the Mongol Empire. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences123(8). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2531003123
