Menopause averted a midlife energetic crisis with help from older dependent children and parents: A simulation study

OBJECTIVES: The grandmother hypothesis proposes that ancestral women ceased reproduction midlife to instead provision their grandchildren.

An alternative two-sex account proposes that the high energetic burden of caring for slow-developing offspring was met with biparental investment.

Menopause evolved because the physiological costs of reproduction increased with age, yet productivity also increased with age, and the benefits of resource transfers by parents and grandparents of both sexes to adult children and their offspring eventually outweighed the diminishing benefits of continued reproduction (Kaplan et al., 2010).

The father absent hypothesis proposes that the higher mortality rate of husbands would often have left wives without the resources to raise young children, selecting for early reproductive cessation (Kuhle, 2007).

Juvenile production plays little role in the three hypotheses, yet subsequent studies have found it to be surprisingly high.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: Simulations were conducted of hunter-gatherer energy consumption and production across the lifespan, taking account of age- and sex-specific survivorship, interbirth intervals, and varying rates of foraging skill acquisition typical of contemporary foragers.

RESULTS: There is a pronounced midlife energy deficit that could be averted with the increasing production of maturing juveniles; midlife cessation of reproduction, which limited the number of mouths to feed; and energy transfers from older parents, and sometimes younger couples (e.g., brideservice).

DISCUSSION: Menopause emerges as an integral and necessary component of the unique human pattern of relatively short interbirth intervals, a long period of juvenile dependency, and extensive food sharing, supporting and extending the two-sex and grandmother hypotheses.