If we change the question to: “What is the probability of the last 12 children born in some town somewhere in the world all being the same sex?” then we see a completely different story. The GeoNames database is an online database containing details of every town in the world with a population of over 500, and it suggests there are just under 200,000 such towns across the planet.

Based on this, we’d actually expect roughly 50 towns in the world with 12 consecutive girls (1/4096 x 200,000), and another 50 with 12 consecutive boys. So, although this run of girls seems like a strange and unique event to the people of Miejsce Odrzanskie, there are in fact probably about 99 other places in the world where something similar is happening right now.