I am still listening to Prof. Mark Leary of Duke U in his Great Course, "Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behavior". He shocked me yesterday when he said that if we draw out our family trees, we will find that two thirds of our ancestors are women and only one third are men. What? No way!
Yes, way! Maybe you already grasp that men can do their part of a baby making operation several times a day for most of their lives. Women have a more limited time to do their part. Besides, once a woman is pregnant, she basically has to wait quite a while to get going again, much of the time, about 9 months. A guy can make many babies in nine months. The basic idea, is that without birth control and without monogamy, over historical time, a few men have taken a large share of the available women. So, those horny powerful wealthy men had many wives. The large group of resulting children had the same daddy.
You may have seen the record, according the Guinness book of world records, the record for children of one woman is 69. A Russian woman in the 1860's had 27 pregnancies and bore multiple births, resulting in 69 children. But a Moroccan ruler had 867 children with the help of many wives. He had more than 10 times the children of the record-holding woman!
I have seen references to Genghis Khan and other Asian rulers who have been found to be ancestors to an inordinate number of people alive today. One of the things that Prof. Leary says is that in all societies, women tend to be interested in men with resources, wealth. So I can see how a woman would be likely to be interested in being one of the wives of a rich and powerful ruler, both for her sake and for that of her children and their future.
I imagine we will hear more about the contributions of a disproportionately small number of men to the gene pool and the resultant advantages and disadvantages we have inherited in our bodies.
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