The tiny Polish village of Miejsce Odrzanskie has become the unlikely source of international media attention over the past fortnight as a result of what the New York Times called “a strange population anomaly”. It has now been almost a decade since the last boy was born in this place, with the most recent 12 babies all having been girls.
The mayor of the region is quoted in the article as saying there has been “scientific interest” — presumably from geneticists — in exploring what has led to this unusual sequence. He also discusses some glaringly unscientific advice the town has been given on how to conceive boys, ranging from changing mothers’ diets to “keeping an ax(e) under your marital bed”.
But the most prosaic suggestion mentioned in the article is also by far the most likely – that it’s just a statistical coincidence.
