Cheating is something that no one would like to be subjected to, but it used to happen in relationships. With DNA tests available in our times, scientists make some interesting discoveries what it used to be in the last 500 years.

DNA tests review the history of cheating

In our time DNA tests can be bought in a pharmacy, like cheap sunglasses. Researchers from Belgium delved into the history of fatherhood in Western Europe for the last 5 centuries, and got some surprising insights into the matters of who used to cheat and with whom.

One of the things that became clear was that cheating in the old days wasn’t as widespread as some might have thought. Extra-pair paternity (EPP) seems to have been a rather rare event during the last five hundred years.

However, such things turned out to be dependent on the social status, with poor people living in 19-century cities among the most affected.

And farmers, for instance, were among those families where EPP events were less likely.

How much cheating was happening among our ancestors?

This depends on your ancestors’ social status, the research concluded. Urbanization could be to blame for cheating to blossom.

The researchers looked into the family history of over 500 couples from Belgium and Netherlands, who shared the same paternal ancestor, according to the genealogical data. Thus, they were supposed to carry the same Y chromosome. If this wasn’t the case, then it was the case of an EPP event.

People in both countries showed the same propensity to such events, the same was true for different religions. However, when looking at factors such as population density and socioeconomic status, the chance of having an EPP event went up for more densely populated areas coupled with lower financial status.

Farmers and merchants only had about 1% of such cases, while workers around 4%.

Middle to high classes had about 0.5% of chance of EPP, while poor people who lived in large cities had up to 6% chance.

On average, occurrence of such events was proven to be in the said countries on the level of about 1%. So, if you thought that in the past people used to cheat a lot, this is a myth.

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