[PDF] Menopause: Adaptation or epiphenomenon? | Semantic Scholar

It is hypothesize that the rapid evolutionary process that led to the growth of the cerebral cortex in humans, as a side effect, led to a high frequency of aneuploidy in oocytes, which has also lead to the formation of menopause in cetaceans.

It is found that grandmothers can facilitate the evolution of a shorter reproductive period when their help decreases the weaning age of their matrilineal grandchildren, and this finding holds true for any form of allocare that helps mothers resume cycling more quickly.

It is concluded that while time‐limited fertility is not in itself adaptive, the duration of subsequent survival is likely to be linked to inclusive fitness benefits arising from protracted parental care of offspring, overlapping generations, and kin group structures means that continued survival of post‐reproductive females is favoured by selection.

A systematic test of two alternatives of the human menopause using field data from two species in which grandmothers frequently engage in kin-directed behaviour finds that elderly females do not suffer increased mortality costs of reproduction, nor do post-reproductive females enhance the fitness of grandchildren or older children.

The patriarch hypothesis proposes that once males became capable of maintaining high status and reproductive access beyond their peak physical condition, selection favored the extension of maximum life span in males, and life span increased in females as well.