Editing Mongols (section)

== Impact ==
Leaving aside the toll in human lives, the Mongols did have some lasting impacts in the areas they conquered. In truth the Mongols did not contribute much new to science, technology or artwork directly, but they were good at spreading things around - starting with your mom's legs. For instance, the male Hungarian aristocracy used to be of the N Y-chromosome, coming from northeastern Europe as they did, like Finns and Estonians. After the Mongols got done, the N type became very rare in Hungary. (Although the peasants kept speaking that language.) This DNA was replaced by Mongol DNA, not just in Hungary, but in all the Russias and deep into Iran and India.

When the Mongols went to Iran, they brought with them rice from China. They also sent cobalt east to Chinese potters for use in their ceramics industry as blue paint. Mongolians built roads and established trade posts on the conquered territories (well, not by themselves - they ordered locals to do it), and were responsible for creating one of the first reliable mail networks, that spanned from Kyiv to Peking (several ancient civilisations beat them to it, not least the ancient Achaemenids, who were first, and the Romans). Additionally, they credited with the first cannons - combining European bell-casting techniques with Chinese gunpowder.  

Mongols also liked to swear a lot, and to this day roughly 10 to 50% of swear words in the places they had conquered have Mongolian roots.

It should be noted that it was under the Mongol Empire that Europe started having more regular contact with the Far East; while this was partly due to them being right on Eastern Europe's doorstep, the Europeans had also sent many emissaries, including famed explorer Marco Polo, who spent years in Kublai Khan's court and introduced Europe to a world that they knew little of before; this culminated in a fascination with the far East, leading to repeated attempts by Europeans to find efficient trade routes during Age of Exploration.