PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Elsa G. Guillot AU - Murray P. Cox TI - High Frequency Haplotypes are Expected Events, not Historical Figures AID - 10.1101/022160 DP - 2015 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 022160 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/07/022160.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/07/022160.full AB - Cultural transmission of reproductive success states that successful men have more children and pass this higher fecundity on to their offspring. Observed in modern human populations from genealogies and surname studies1, in a genetic setting cultural transmission of reproductive success would cause particular male lines to dominate on the Y chromosome. Balaresque and colleagues2 interrogated a Y chromosome dataset from Central Asia to determine whether they could reconstruct historic instances of this behavior. Screening 8 microsatellites on the Y chromosome in 5,321 Central Asian men (distribution in Figure 1), they identified 15 haplotypes that were ‘unusually frequent,’ which they defined as those haplotypes carried by more than 20 men (grey bars). The authors connect these lineages to prominent historical figures, including Genghis Khan and Giocangga.