Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity
Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity
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DOI：
10.1002/ajhb.10156
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发表时间：
2003-05-01
影响因子：
2.9
通讯作者：
Hawkes, K
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hawkes, K
类人猿是我们最亲近的近亲，比大多数其他哺乳动物活得更长，成熟得更晚，现代人类甚至更晚成熟，寿命可能更长。进化生活史理论试图解释这些变量的跨物种差异以及它们之间的协变。这为一个假设提供了基础，即祖母的一个新角色是第一批广泛成功的人属成员从类人猿祖先模式转变为更像我们自己的祖先模式的基础。这一假说将人类生活史的四个显著特征联系起来：1）我们的潜在寿命，2）我们的晚熟，3）我们的中年更年期，以及4）我们的早期断奶，下一个后代在前一个婴儿可以养活自己之前产生。我讨论这个问题，然后，使用现代人和黑猩猩分别代表属人和南方古猿，我专注于这个祖母假说的两个推论：1）祖先特定年龄的生育能力下降在我们的属中持续存在，而2）衰老在其他方面的生理表现减缓。这些数据很少，但它们说明了特定年龄生育率下降的相似性和体细胞耐久性的差异，这与我们属的长寿是祖先祖母的“生殖”作用的遗产的假设是一致的。(C)2003 Wiley-Liss，Inc.
Great apes, our closest living relatives, live longer and mature later than most other mammals and modern humans are even later-maturing and potentially longer-lived. Evolutionary life-history theory seeks to explain cross-species differences in these variables and the covariation between them. That provides the foundation for a hypothesis that a novel role for grandmothers underlies the shift from an ape-like ancestral pattern to one more like our own in the first widely successful members of genus Homo. This hypothesis links four distinctive features of human life histories: 1) our potential longevity, 2) our late maturity, 3) our midlife menopause, and 4) our early weaning with next offspring produced before the previous infant can feed itself. I discuss the problem, then, using modern humans and chimpanzees to represent, respectively, genus Homo and australopithecines, I focus on two corollaries of this grandmother hypothesis: 1) that ancestral age-specific fertility declines persisted in our genus, while 2) senescence in other aspects of physiological performance slowed down. The data are scanty but they illustrate similarities in age-specific fertility decline and differences in somatic durability that are consistent with the hypothesis that increased longevity in our genus is a legacy of the "reproductive" role of ancestral grandmothers. (C) 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc.