Kazakh folklore says that the body of Jochi, Genghis Khan’s eldest son, lies in a mausoleum in the Ulytau region, in the country’s central highlands. However, when archaeologists recently studied the body from the medieval mausoleum, they did not find Jochi – but they did find a new genetic lineage that may have been carried on by Genghis himself.
Genghis Khanborn Temüjin in the Khentii Mountains of northeastern Mongolia, was a Central Asian warrior who founded the sprawling Mongol Empire in 1206. The Mongols’ astonishing horsemanship and skill with the bow and arrow enabled them to quickly conquer a territory stretching from the Pacific 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’ own death. The northwestern part of the Mongol Empire that Jochi (also spelled Joshi, Zhoshi and Jüshi) ruled was later known as Golden Horde.
To try to uncover DNA from Genghis’s close relatives, Askapuli and colleagues investigated folklore claims that Jochi, who died after falling from a horse in Ulytau, was buried in the mausoleum of the same name, which was built at least 70 years after his death. They published their findings on February 19 in the journal PNAS.
For the study, the researchers went to the Ulytau region and analyzed male skeletons from three medieval mausoleums that allegedly belonged to Jochi and other men from the elite Golden Horde. The team surveyed these individuals DNA to look at their Y chromosome data, which is passed down from father to son.
Two of the male skeletons were carbon-dated to between 1286 and 1398, making it unlikely that they are 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 – believed to be associated with Genghis Khan.
A 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 his Y-DNA will look like,” Askapuli said. “Not just from him, but his sons, his grandsons, next of kin — none of them are known. So this is an attempt to answer that question.”
A previous study published in 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 in people living in what was once the Mongol Empire. These researchers concluded that the lineage was likely carried by male descendants of Genghis Khan and that 0.5% of the world’s male population today, or 1 in 200 men, may be descended from the famous warrior.
In the new analysis, Askapuli and 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 belongs to the C3* cluster that was previously thought to be Genghis Khan’s,” Askapuli said, “but this 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 Golden Horde elites have one of those branches.”
The specific branch that the researchers found in the mausoleum skeletons is actually much more rare than the one discovered in 2003, meaning that far fewer men alive today are related to Genghis Khan than previously thought.
The researchers also found that the individuals in the Golden Horde mausoleums could largely trace their ancestry to ancient Northeast Asian (ANA) populations, with genetic contributions from the Kipchaks, a group of East Scythian-related nomads who lived in the Eurasian steppe and were integrated into the Golden Horde in the Middle Ages.
Although the exact Y chromosome lineage that Genghis Khan shared with his male descendants remains unknown, Askapuli believes that in the near future scientists may be able to answer this question.
“If we have a grave that is historically recorded and also have a tombstone that says this person belonged to the descendants of Genghis Khan, and then if we perform genetic tests 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., & 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
