Three hundred years of low non-paternity in a human population

Abstract

When cuckoldry is frequent we can expect fathers to withhold investment in offspring that may not be theirs. Human paternal investment can be substantial and is in line with observations from tens of thousands of conceptions that suggest that cuckoldry is rare in humans. The generality of this claim seems to be in question as the rate of cuckoldry varies across populations and studies have mostly been on Western populations. Two additional factors complicate our conclusions, (1) current estimates of the rate of cuckoldry in humans may not reflect our past behaviour as adultery can be concealed by the use of contraceptives; and (2) it is difficult to obtain samples that are random with respect to their paternity certainty. Studies that combine genealogies with Y-chromosome haplotyping are able to circumvent some of these problems by probing into humans' historical behaviour. Here we use this approach to investigate 1273 conceptions over a period of 330 years in 23 families of the Afrikaner population in South Africa. We use haplotype frequency and diversity and coalescent simulations to show that the male population did not undergo a severe bottleneck and that paternity exclusion rates are high for this population. The rate of cuckoldry in this Western population was 0.9% (95% confidence interval 0.4-1.5%), and we argue that given the current data on historical populations we have to conclude that, at least for Western human populations, cuckoldry rate is probably in the range of 1%.

Exclusion rates in court-directed and personal information paternity tests in Russian Federation

“…The overall paternity exclusion rate was 23.5% which is significantly higher those reported in [4][5].…”

“…Once determination of the paternity status began to be routinely assessed by DNA analysis reported rates of non-paternity were significantly higher, reaching 20-30% [3]. Some scholars consider that in human populations non-paternity rates are declining and constitute 2-3% [4], while a recent study [5] proposes that in Western human populations cuckoldry rate is probably in the range of 1%. Here we report results of the largest study of non-paternity rates in the Russian Federation and one of the largest studies of non-paternity ever conducted.…”

Patterns of African and Asian admixture in the Afrikaner population of South Africa

“…The estimated times of admixture differs between African and Asian populations (Table S4) and was estimated for around 9-10 generations for West Africans and Khoe-San and around 15-16 generations for Asians. In the Afrikaner population the average generation time for men was 32.92 years whereas for women it was 27.36 (43), suggesting that the Afrikaner population is on average between 11 and 13 generations old. Since many admixing events occurred during early colonial times, genetic dating of admixture times is expected to fall in this range as well.…”

Human Y-chromosome variation in the genome-sequencing era

“…The attests to low non-paternity rates in the studied populations, which specific studies seem to confirm 70,71 .…”