MIAMI — A British research firm recently combed 25,000 DNA samples searching for a modern descendant of Genghis Khan from outside the Mongolian warlord's ancient empire.
They found the first one: a University of Miami accounting professor with a receding hairline.
Tom Robinson, a 48-year-old Palmetto Bay, Fla., resident, has taken the odd news with amiable modesty. In some quarters, he's being treated like the guy who walks into a store and finds out he's the millionth customer.
The Mongolian ambassador to the United States plans to invite him as an honored guest to his Washington embassy.
"Haven't done any conquering"
They're an unlikely pair, the emperor and the accountant. Genghis was known as the type of guy who would conquer villages across two continents, murder entire tribes and take thousands of female partners. Robinson, on the other hand, just returned from a cruise to Alaska with his wife of 25 years.
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"I think I do have a certain number of administrative skills," Robinson said, noting he was once president of a local financial analyst society. "I haven't done any conquering, per se."
Genes' travels a mystery
Despite their disparate life-styles, the link is backed by strong genetic evidence, according to Bryan Sykes, an Oxford University geneticist who conducted the research for his private company, Oxford Ancestors.
Robinson's Y chromosome bears seven of nine genetic markers identical to the Genghis genetic signature — remarkably close considering the two men lived more than 700 years apart, Sykes said.
The Genghis genetic mark was discovered in 2003 by a group of 23 international geneticists, who found that 8 percent of all males in large parts of Asia carry startlingly similar genetic markers. Those markers are historically traceable to areas ruled by Genghis and his sons.
Women can only learn if they are descended from Genghis through male relatives because only men have a Y chromosome.
No one has tested Genghis' actual DNA because his tomb has never been found. Though Genghis is believed to have 16 million Asian descendants, Robinson is the first Caucasian linked to the 13th-century marauder, Sykes said.
The history of the world from Genghis Khan to Tom Robinson begins with a sexual appetite rivaled only by boastful basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain.
"With every people who he conquered, Genghis Khan set up a large harem, and he took as many women as he wanted," said Nicholas Wade, a New York Times writer who recently published "Before the Dawn," a book on recent human evolution that devotes a chapter to the Genghis genetic phenomenon.
Wade points out that 13th-century Persian historian Ata-Malik Juvaini claimed Genghis fathered 20,000 children in an empire stretching from Eastern Europe to China. Among the Hazara tribe along the Pakistan and Afghanistan borders — a group that has long claimed they were Genghis' descendants — 30 percent of all men bear his genetic mark, according to the groundbreaking 2003 study called "The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols," published by the American Society of Human Genetics.
How did those genes make it to Robinson's ancestral home in England's bucolic Lake District near the Scottish border?
That remains a mystery. It's possible Robinson's ancestors traveled from the Ukraine — the edge of the Mongol empire — on Viking slave ships, Sykes said. But he admits that's conjecture.
"It's a very good demonstration of how we all have a mixed ancestry," Sykes said. "We don't think we do, but we do."
Genetics are big business for Sykes, who wrote a bestselling book called "The Seven Daughters of Eve," which fueled an international interest in genetic familial ties. He has attracted 25,000 male customers and even more female ones since he founded Oxford Ancestors in 2001.
For $320, Sykes tells customers which ancient tribes they may be linked to, based on genetic markers.
