Antiquity of postreproductive life: Are there modern impacts on hunter‐gatherer postreproductive life spans?

@article{BlurtonJones2002AntiquityOP,
  title={Antiquity of postreproductive life: Are there modern impacts on hunter‐gatherer postreproductive life spans?},
  author={Nicholas G. Blurton Jones and Kristen Hawkes and James F. O'connell},
  journal={American Journal of Human Biology},
  year={2002},
  volume={14}
}
Female postreproductive life is a striking feature of human life history and there have been several recent attempts to account for its evolution. But archaeologists estimate that in the past, few individuals lived many postreproductive years. Is postreproductive life a phenotypic outcome of modern conditions, needing no evolutionary account? This article assesses effects of the modern world on hunter‐gatherer adult mortality, with special reference to the Hadza. Evidence suggests that such… 
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This work argues for an adaptive life span of 68-78 years for modern "Homo sapiens" based on analysis of mortality profiles obtained from small-scale hunter-gatherer and horticultural populations from around the world, and integrates information on age-specific dependency and resource production to help explain the adaptive utility of longevity in humans from an evolutionary perspective.
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  • K. Hawkes
  • Biology
    American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council
  • 2003
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Using modern humans and chimpanzees to represent, respectively, genus Homo and australopithecines, two corollaries of the grandmother hypothesis are focused on: that ancestral age‐specific fertility declines persisted in the authors' genus, while 2) senescence in other aspects of physiological performance slowed down.
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It is shown that grandmothers increase the survival of their grandoffspring, and these effects are greatest when grandmothers are no longer reproducing, which can help explain the long postreproductive life spans of resident killer whales.
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Two distinct but related traits have been lumped together under the same concept of “post‐reproductive lifespan,” one that is tremendously widespread and another that is derived to hominins, and that the differences and connections between these two traits are necessary for understanding human life‐history evolution.
Ecological Knowledge, Leadership, and the Evolution of Menopause in Killer Whales
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