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Menopause is one of the oddest features of human reproductive biology. Not the hot flashes or the forgetfulness, but the fact that older women lose the ability to have babies. Now researchers say that once it appeared, menopause may have had a ripple effect on human mating that helped create the human pair-bond.
According to a new paper in PNAS this week from a team led by University of Utah anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, menopause could be the evolutionary gateway to romance. The origins of menopause are pretty mysterious: most animals, including other primates and human males, can keep on making babies as they age.
Hawkes is one of a group of scientists who think grandmothers are the key: early humans who gave up childbearing and helped feed and care for their grandchildren wound up with more descendants, outcompeting their babies-till-old-age cousins. This “grandmother hypothesis” is still controversial: behaviors don’t fossilize, so it’s hard to find definitive evidence for or against it. But proponents believe that grandmothering, and the longer lifespan that came with it, could have had widespread effects on human social systems.
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If early human societies had more fertile males than fertile females, then as lifespans got longer, the pool of older males competing for younger, fertile females got larger. Eventually, Hawkes says, males that held on to the mates they already had wound up fathering more children than the males who kept looking for someone new.
Read full, original post: Menopause May Be the Evolutionary Origin of Romantic Relationships – And Cheating
