Abstract
Cultural transmission of reproductive success states that successful men have more children and pass this raised fecundity to their offspring. Balaresque and colleagues found high frequency haplotypes in a Central Asian Y chromosome dataset, which they attribute to cultural transmission of reproductive success by prominent historical men, including Genghis Khan. Using coalescent simulation, we show that these high frequency haplotypes are consistent with a neutral model, where they commonly appear simply by chance. Hence, explanations invoking cultural transmission of reproductive success are statistically unnecessary.
Copyright
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
- Posted September 17, 2015.
High Frequency Haplotypes are Expected Events, not Historical Figures
