Pretoria - If you are an Afrikaner and have ever wondered whether one of your ancestors was born of an illicit liaison, you can rest assured that your lineage is probably intact.
New research into 23 common Afrikaans surnames has found that the incidence of "false fatherhoods" was lower than 1% over the last 300 years, according to a report by Radio Sonder Grendse.
This means that Afrikaner women very rarely committed adultery, or passed off the children born out of those affairs as their husbands'.
Professor Jaco Greeff and Christoff Erasmus from the University of Pretoria published their findings in May.
They were assisted by a team of genealogists to find living descendants of these 23 families and 199 volunteers participated in the study.
The study looked at the Y chromosomes, which only men have, as a large part of the Y chromosome is not mixed with a mother's DNA, and are transferred from father to son like surnames.
They looked at 1 273 conceptions over the 300 years.
Of all the tests conducted, they found only 11 cases where a Y chromosome did not fit the specific gene.
Greeff says that nowadays the "fruit" of illegitimate relationships can be easily concealed thanks to contraceptives.
He says their findings were surprisingly low, compared to other data, especially from Europe.
An example of an Afrikaner woman
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