Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
benefi ting from the scientifi c approach to the world that has made our lives
richer by banishing superstitious notions about monsters eating the sun.
The domestication of animals, starting with the East Asian domestication
of the dog, helped to provide us with the resources to build our present-day
technological civilization. How have we ourselves changed, driven in part
by the results of these domestications, and how have we changed the world?
The genetic changes to our own species have been numerous during this
time, but the infl uence of animal domestications on these changes is compli-
cated to say the least.
We have seen how the unusual reproductive success of the unknown
Mongolian's descendants continued even beyond the time of Genghis and
Kublai Khan. Many of their descendants also enjoyed a higher than average
evolutionary fi tness. Some of the boys that I saw racing their horses across
the valley fl oor must have been carriers of the unknown Mongolian's chro-
mosome. They had benefi ted from a millennium of reproductive success
that has been unequaled in modern human history.
Is there some gene, on the Y chromosome or elsewhere, that is respon-
sible for this high fi tness? Almost certainly not. There are few genes on the
Y chromosome to begin with, and the genes on our other chromosomes are
mixed and scrambled each generation. Any association of a favorable gene
on the other chromosomes with the unknown Mongolian's Y chromosome
would soon have been broken. But the men who carried that Y chromosome
had access to, or proximity to, power and privilege for many generations. That
power was initially generated by the exploits of Genghis Khan and his horse-
men.
The taming of the dog, the yak, the Bactrian camel, and probably the
horse in this remote and challenging region of the world set the evolution-
ary stage for one of the most cataclysmic events in human history, the sweep
across the known world of the Mongol horde. There is no doubt that the
accumulated ef ects of such social and cultural changes over the millennia
have had an impact on our gene pool.
New molecular evidence shows that the rate of our evolution has accel-
Africa and swept through Europe and Asia. Some of these changes, such as
