Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity
Abstract
Great apes, our closest living relatives, live longer and mature later than most other mammals and modern humans are even later-maturing and potentially longer-lived. Evolutionary life-history theory seeks to explain cross-species differences in these variables and the covariation between them. That provides the foundation for a hypothesis that a novel role for grandmothers underlies the shift from an ape-like ancestral pattern to one more like our own in the first widely successful members of genus Homo. This hypothesis links four distinctive features of human life histories: 1). our potential longevity, 2). our late maturity, 3). our midlife menopause, and 4). our early weaning with next offspring produced before the previous infant can feed itself. I discuss the problem, then, using modern humans and chimpanzees to represent, respectively, genus Homo and australopithecines, I focus on two corollaries of this grandmother hypothesis: 1). that ancestral age-specific fertility declines persisted in our genus, while 2). senescence in other aspects of physiological performance slowed down. The data are scanty but they illustrate similarities in age-specific fertility decline and differences in somatic durability that are consistent with the hypothesis that increased longevity in our genus is a legacy of the "reproductive" role of ancestral grandmothers.
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In contrast to great apes, primiparous women of human forager populations are provisioned by mature adults, such as post-reproductive grandmothers, husbands several years older who have often passed through emerging adulthood, and other adults.
“In contrast to great apes, primiparous women of human forager populations are provisioned by mature adults, such as grandmothers, who are usually post-reproductive (77, 78); their husbands, who are typically several years older and have often passed through the emerging adulthood stage of their life history before marriage; and other adults (3, 79–81).”
From Emerging Adulthood, a Pre-adult Life-History Stage (2020) · cites this paper as [77]
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- Authors
- Hawkes, K.
- Affiliations
- University of Utah (US)
- Corresponding author
- Hawkes, Kristen
- ORCID
- Hawkes, Kristen
- Venue
- American Journal of Human Biology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2003-04-14
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 380-400
- ISSN
- 1042-0533 (ISSN-L)
- 1520-6300
- OpenAlex
- W2160394440
- Cited by
- 582
- References
- 251
- Citations by year
- 2026: 19 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 32 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 35 · 2021: 55 · 2020: 27 · 2019: 33 · 2018: 14 · 2017: 25 · 2016: 18 · 2015: 28 · 2014: 27 · 2013: 28 · 2012: 29
- FWCI
- 3.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- American Journal of Human Biology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics › Animal Behavior and Reproduction
- Social Sciences › Anthropology › Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology
- Keywords
- grandmother hypothesis, human longevity, life history theory, great apes, chimpanzees, australopithecines, senescence, menopause, weaning, late maturity, Homo evolution
- MeSH terms
- Aging, Animals, Pan troglodytes, Biological Evolution, Family, Humans, Longevity, Models, Biological
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