That old joke about the milkman fathering many of a town’s children—it’s far from true, a new study reaffirms.
Researchers analyzed the Y chromosome and genealogy data of 513 pairs of men living in Belgium and the Netherlands. Based on the genealogy data, each pair shared a common paternal ancestor and therefore should have had identical Y chromosomes, unless there was a case of adultery, or what scientists call extra-pair paternity. The study confirmed that the vast majority—99 percent—were indeed genetically related through their paternal lineage, which the authors say buck some common assumptions.
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“Together with many other paintings and historical references in theatre and literature to cuckoldry, you would assume that there was potentially a higher extra-pair paternity rate among aristocratic families in which there was a large age gap between husband and wife,” [researcher Maarten] Larmuseau tells Newsweek.
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The results showed that overall extra-pair paternity was low, only turning up in about 1 percent of the cases, though the result depended on socioeconomic status. Extra-pair paternity showed up in 6 percent of cases of urban families with low socioeconomic status living in densely populated cities in the 19th century.
Read full, original post: Children of Extramarital Affairs Were and Are Rare: Study
