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Grandmothers, hunters and human life history

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Abstract

This paper critiques the competing “Grandmother Hypothesis” and “Embodied Capital Theory” as evolutionary explanations of the peculiarities of human life history traits. Instead, I argue that the correct explanation for human life history probably involves elements of both hypotheses: long male developmental periods and lives probably evolved due to group selection for male hunting via increased female fertility, and female long lives due to the differential contribution women’s complex foraging skills made to their children and grandchildren’s nutritional status within groups provisioned by male hunting.

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Notes

  1. Other explanations for human life history include, the “good mother hypothesis” (i.e., that women give up increasingly dangerous childbearing in favor of raising current children) (Williams 1957) and the “patriarch hypothesis” (i.e., older men being able to reproduce with much younger women led to increased male and female longevity) (Marlowe 2000).

  2. This is life expectancy at 45 for women; low life expectancies quoted for pre-modern and foraging societies are life expectancies at birth and include high infant mortality and mortality from childbearing.

  3. The female focus of life history models may be a convenience due to the ease of measuring and modeling the values of relevant life history variables for females in real populations, rather than reflecting an intention to explain male life history as a side effect. Males and females likely do face different life history selection pressures, as Hawkes et al. do recognize (Hawkes et al. 1997, 1998).

  4. A referee has pointed out that there is at least one other model of longevity (Tuljapurkar et al. 2007) in which increases in female longevity are driven by male longevity, thus explaining both sexes’ evolution at once—the question is whether the assumptions of such models (i.e., males over 50 who retain their fertility often mating with much younger females) reflect human mating arrangements amongst early Homo sapiens.

  5. A referee has argued that perhaps the model won’t predict this if women are generating other types of fitness effects from of other types of difficult to learn skills (such as childcare, conflict mediation, teaching and the accrual of social capital). However, there is little evidence about the fitness effects of such production; prima facie, none of these proposed skills are either unique or more important for women (such as teaching or social capital) or difficult to learn (childcare) as they would need to be to explain where women’s extra production (and hence longer life) is coming from. The referee also correctly notes that the difference between men’s and women’s lifespans is less pronounced in foraging societies than in western ones; however, while this is true, the difference is still there and still goes in the wrong direction for the model.

  6. One possible explanation is offered by (Gurven and Walker 2006)—that weaning children early and keeping them small, followed by an adolescent growth spurt when they have acquired some of the skills to help them be nearly self-supporting, minimizes the energetic load on parents from raising many highly dependent children at once.

  7. One referee has also pointed out that some models of sharing in a group context (of a slightly different kind than I am describing here) also support the idea that sharing groups can drive the evolution of lengthened lifespans even with the dilution of the effect from sharing with non-relatives (Lee 2008).

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Acknowledgments

This paper was much improved by helpful comments from John W. Carroll and from several anonymous reviewers.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, North Carolina State University, Campus Box 8103, Raleigh, NC, 27695-8103, USA

    Catherine Driscoll

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Driscoll, C. Grandmothers, hunters and human life history. Biol Philos 24, 665–686 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-009-9166-x

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