Tracing back the y chromosome to history's unsavoury characters

Professor Sykes:
If you look at y chromosomes, we haven't talked much about this, but you can use y chromosomes the same as M-DNA to look at the origins of people and so on. If you look at y chromosomes, you do find huge numbers of identical y chromosomes that have now been traced back, the most famous example, to rather what we would now consider to be unsavoury characters.

So there we're faced with, well you might think "well great, we're going to have a world populated by women", well we're not because men are still needed to carry on the species but actually as I explore right at the end of Adam's curse, I'm not so sure that men need even to be kept around for that. And when you come down to it, all men actually do, males I should say, not just men, from a genetic point of view is to fertilise eggs with sperm. And actually what men spend most of their time doing is trying to persuade women, the bearer of eggs, to accept their sperm but that's another story.

And the most famous of these is Genghis Khan. There are sixty million men in Asia that are direct descendents of Genghis Khan. Now how did he do that, how did his y chromosome do that? Well we know how it did it, he conquered lands, killed all the men and inseminated all women, passed the wealth down to his sons who carried on in the family tradition. So that is how it happened and you can see examples of that all over the place. And that's why I think that, that's the basis of my argument, that the y chromosome is very, very cunning, it really does benefit from that kind of behaviour which is calamatise in many respects.