Who’s the daddy? Difficult to say in Victorian times | Sarah Ditum
by Sarah Ditum from Science | The Guardian on (#4V7WA)
New research sheds light on the parlous lot of women during the Industrial Revolution
The women of the 19th-century urban poor were at it. Sneaking around, getting some. That, anyway, is the conclusion drawn from some recently reported DNA research, published in the journal Current Biology.
The authors of the paper compared the Y chromosomes of 513 pairs of men who supposedly share a common ancestor to determine the prevalence of what they called "extra-pair paternity" over the past 500 years - in other words, the number of times in the men's family trees that the father named on the birth certificate wasn't the same as the man who supplied the sperm.
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