The generation times of our recent ancestors can tell us about both the biology and social organization of prehistoric humans, placing human evolution on an absolute time scale. We present a method for predicting historical male and female generation times based on changes in the mutation spectrum. Our analyses of whole-genome data reveal an average generation time of 26.9 years across the past 250,000 years, with fathers consistently older (30.7 years) than mothers (23.2 years). Shifts in sex-averaged generation times have been driven primarily by changes to the age of paternity, although we report a substantial increase in female generation times in the recent past. We also find a large difference in generation times among populations, reaching back to a time when all humans occupied Africa.
We find subtle changes to the average human generation interval among populations in the last 1000 generations. Average generation times in European and South Asian populations have increased slightly, while generation times in African and East Asian populations have changed little. Similar results in the recent past were observed when using only private alleles. We estimate a shorter sex-averaged generation interval for Europeans (26.1 years) than East Asians (27.1 years) over the past 40,000 years, supporting a recent estimate derived from divergence to archaic DNA. Beyond this most recent time frame, the average generation interval in each of the ancestral non-African populations grows progressively shorter into the past.
