Why does Women's fertility end in mid-life? Grandmothering and age at last birth

DOI10.1016/J.JTBI.2018.10.035MaRDI QIDQ1716883zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Peter S. Kim, John S. McQueen, Kristen Hawkes

Publication date 5 February 2019

Published in Journal of Theoretical Biology (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.12048

zbMATH Keywords

agent-based modelinggrandmotheringhuman evolutionhuman longevitylife historymenopause

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Problems related to evolution (92D15) Population dynamics (general) (92D25) Animal behavior (92D50)

Abstract: Great apes, the other living members of our hominid family, become decrepit before the age of forty and rarely outlive their fertile years. In contrast, women - even in high mortality hunter-gatherer populations - usually remain healthy and productive well beyond menopause. The grandmother hypothesis aims to account for the evolution of this distinctive feature of human life history. Our previous mathematical simulations of that hypothesis fixed the end of female fertility at the age of 45, based on the similarities among living hominids, and then modeled the evolution of human-like longevity from an ancestral state, like that of the great apes, due only to grandmother effects. A major modification here allows the age female fertility ends to vary as well, directly addressing a version of the question, influentially posed by GC Williams six decades ago: Why isn't menopause later in humans? Our model is an agent-based model (ABM) that accounts for the coevolution of both expected adult lifespan and end of female fertility as selection maximizes reproductive value. We find that grandmother effects not only drive the population from an equilibrium representing a great ape-like longevity to a new human-like longevity, they also maintain the observed termination of women's fertility before the age of 50.

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Cites work

• A theory of Fisher's reproductive value
• Evolution of longevity, age at last birth and sexual conflict with grandmothering
• Grandmothering drives the evolution of longevity in a probabilistic model

Cited in

(9)

• Emergence and maintenance of menopause in humans: a game theory model
• Adult sex ratio as an index for male strategy in primates
• A mathematical model for the effects of grandmothering on human longevity
• How evolutionary biology can explain why human and a few marine mammal females are the only ones that are menopausal
• Male mating choices: the drive behind menopause?
• Grandmothering drives the evolution of longevity in a probabilistic model
• On the evolution of intergenerational division of labor, menopause and transfers among adults and offspring
• Evolution of longevity, age at last birth and sexual conflict with grandmothering
• Evolution of human pair bonds as a consequence of male-biased mating sex ratios?

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