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Grandmas often help out a lot with grandkids. That may be why women live long past reproductive age and why menopause, which is rare among animals, evolved—an idea called the “grandmother hypothesis.” Now, two new studies published today (February 7) in Current Biology offer some evidence that supports the hypothesis, with some caveats. In some 17th- and 18th-century communities, the studies found, the younger a grandma was and the closer she lived to her grandkids the better chance they had of surviving early childhood.
“Grandmother help is central to human families all around the world, but we find that the opportunity and ability to provide help to young grandchildren declines with grandmother age,” Virpi Lummaa of the University of Turku in Finland, a coauthor of the one of the studies, says in a statement.
Lummaa and her colleagues studied the records of Finnish churchgoers born from ...
