Interdisciplinary seminar day with Martin Daly and Gretchen Perry

We were delighted to host Professors Martin Daly (McMaster University) and Gretchen Perry (Lakehead University) for a day of excellent talks (11.07.2018) in Turku at Panimoravintola Koulu, from speakers in a range of disciplines. The focus was particularly on alloparenting in humans, but also included talks on elephant alloparenting, evolutionary psychology, and the life-histories of Karelian evacuees and servicewomen. We heard about a lot of interesting work, and got one or two ideas for investigating contexts of grandmothering in our historic Finnish data from work that has been done on contemporary grandmothering - this underlines the importance of interdisciplinary meetings!

In attendance (in order of talks):
Virpi Lummaa (UTU, biology)
Martin Daly (McMaster University)
Gretchen Perry (Lakehead University)
Mirkka Danielsbacka (UTU, social sciences)
Antti Tanskanen (UTU, social sciences)
Simon Chapman (UTU, biology)
Hannu Lehti (UTU, social sciences)
Mirkka Lahdenperä (UTU, biology)
Emily Lynch (UTU, biology)
John Loehr (University of Helsinki)
Markus Rantala (UTU, biology & Turku Brain and Mind Centre)
Jenni Pettay (UTU, biology)
Robert Lynch (UTU, biology)

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Other News

Lummaa Group held a truly good Annual Meeting 2018 in Seili

Visit from Silke van Daalen and Hal Caswell

We are delighted to once again host PhD candidate Silke van Daalen, who will stay with us for most of September.

New paper accepted for publication: Human Reproductive Update

Laisk T, Tšuiko O, Jatsenko T, Hõrak P, Otala M, Lahdenperä M, Lummaa V, Tuuri T, Salumets A, Tapanainen JS:

New Paper: Grandmotherhood across the demographic transition

Simon's latest work on the demography of grandmothers is now out in PLoS ONE.

Robert at HBES

Robert Lynch is at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) conference 2018 in Amsterdam

New paper accepted for publication in Nature Reviews Genetics

The manuscript "The transition to modernity and chronic disease: mismatch and natural selection" by Stephen Corbett, Alexandre Courtiol, Virpi Lummaa, Jacob Moorad and Stephen Stea

New Papers: Demography of grandparenthood and testing the X-linked grandmother hypothesis

Two papers out now from Simon's PhD project!

1) Changes in the Length of Grandparenthood in Finland 1790-1959, published in the Finnish Yearbook of Population Reasarch. In this paper, the team investigated how the shared time between grandparents and grandchildren changed across the demographic transition and with industrialisation. This shared time was low and stable before these major events, and began to increase rapidly after they began.

2) Limited support for the X-linked grandmother hypothesis in pre-industrial Finland, published in Biology Letters. Here, we tested whether slight differences in relatedness via the X-chromosome might lead to differences the survival of male and female grandchildren with maternal or paternal grandmothers. Though two of three predictions were supported, we concluded that the X-linked grandmother hypothesis cannot account for lineage differences by itself.