While today it is even possible to have a child in 200 years, one question seems to be legitimate: but how many children – at most – a person can have? Surely, what seems to be obvious is that a man can have more than women, since the former are not hindered by pregnancy.
When we think of prolific parents it is impossible not to mention Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire who lived from 1162 to 1227 AD, and biological evidence has shown that about 8% of men living in a part of Asia from northeastern China (over 16 million people) have an unusual Y chromosome lineage linked to the Khan.
Legends (which cannot be verified) say that that Genghis Khan had around 500 concubines and hundreds of children throughout his kingdom. Similarly a sultan of Morocco, Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty (1672-1727), is said to have fathered some 1,171 children by 500 women in a 32-year reproductive period.
Today for obvious reasons there are many fewer cases, but there have been reports that i Sperm donors have managed to father hundreds of children through artificial insemination. In 2016, just imagine, a donor in the UK claimed to be the father of 800 children. Virtually, therefore, men can father thousands of children.
For women this number is much more limited and the world record for “woman with the most children of all” belonged to Valentina Vassilyev, a Russian peasant girl who lived in the 18th century and had 69 children born through 27 pregnancies, in which she gave birth to 16 sets of twins, seven triplets and four quadruplets (although there have been some doubts as to whether this is statistically and biologically possible).
