Researcher Tatiana Zerjal, from the University of Oxford in England, and a team of geneticists took genetic samples of over twenty-one thousand men from all over Asia. They were looking for variations in certain genetic “markers,” or sequences of genes that tell you something about where people came from. To their astonishment, they found that one out of every twelve Asian men in regions once part of the Mongol empire carry a form of the Y chromosome that can be traced to Mongolia a thousand years ago. How did this genetic tag become so widespread? Khan, they suggest. There is reason to believe that Khan himself, and thus his long-ruling descendants, had this particular form of Y chromosome. And though his power is long faded, the genetic empire of the conqueror is going strong–in roughly one out of every two hundred men alive today.