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The grandmother hypothesis is a hypothesis to explain the existence of menopause in human life history by identifying the adaptive value of extended kin networking. It builds on the previously postulated "mother hypothesis" which states that as mothers age, the costs of reproducing become greater, and energy devoted to those activities would be better spent helping her offspring in their ...
The Grandmother hypothesis suggests that menopause was selected for humans because it promotes the survival of grandchildren. According to this hypothesis, post-reproductive women feed and care for children, adult nursing daughters, and grandchildren whose mothers have weaned them.
The grandmother cell hypothesis is an extreme version of the idea of sparseness, [22] [5] and is not without critics. The opposite of the grandmother cell theory is the distributed representation theory, that states that a specific stimulus is coded by its unique pattern of activity over a large group of neurons widely distributed in the brain.
Finally, Williams' 1957 paper was the first to outline the "grandmother hypothesis". William's formulation stated that natural selection might select for menopause and post-reproductive life in females (though not explicitly mentioning grandchildren or the inclusive fitness contribution of grand-parenting).
The dating for "Eve" was a blow to the multiregional hypothesis, which was debated at the time, and a boost to the theory of the recent origin model. [ 15 ] Cann, Stoneking and Wilson did not use the term "Mitochondrial Eve" or even the name "Eve" in their original paper.
Hawkes, an expert in human evolution and sociobiology, is the author of several studies on the “grandmother hypothesis,” which asserts that many of the characteristics that distinguish us from our ape ancestors are thanks to the thoughtful care of our mothers' mothers. [4]
The Grandmother Hypothesis states that menopause comes about into older women in order to restrict the time of reproduction as a protective mechanism. This would allow women to live longer and increase the amount of care they could provide to their grandchildren , increasing their evolutionary fitness. [ 43 ]
Lummaa has also studied the grandmother hypothesis in Asian elephants. In addition to testing the grandmother hypothesis, Lummaa has used this dataset to evaluate the impact of having a male twin on females. She found that females with a twin brother had reduced fertility, suggesting a prenatal effect on females with a twin brother. [8]