C 2001 Bryan Sykes
Norton Publishers
Norton Publishers
page 190-191 on Y chromosomes (passed on my males) and prolific males
..."It's true that there have been some particularly prolific males. The world record holder is Moulay Ismail, Emperor of Morocco, who is alleged to have had 700 sons (so presumably as many daughters) by the time he was 49 in 1721. He died in 1727 - so there was another six years to have some more. The most prolific woman comes way behind this. She is Mrs. Feodora Vassilyev, a Russian woman who produced sixty-nine children between 1725 and 1765. They were all multiple births - sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four lots of quadruplets - so she was a remarkable woman in that respect as well. The capacity f women to produce large numbers of children is limited by their biology which restricts then to one pregnancy a year at most. Men, on the other hand, are not on a restricted by this timetable and can, in theory, have thousand of children. But the fantasy of enormously prolific males seeding the entire world, thereby reducing the diversity of Y chromosomes by their prodigious feats of polygamy, turned out to be just that. Fantasy. A hard slog in laboratories around the world over the past ten years has found that there are plenty of mutations on the Y chromosome after all..."
