Simon's newest paper is published online in Current Biology

ScienceNews 7.2.2019

Evolutionarily, grandmas are good for grandkids — up to a point

Women may live past their reproductive years because they help their grandchildren survive

Grandmothers are great — generally speaking. But evolutionarily speaking, it’s puzzling why women past their reproductive years live so long.

Grandma’s age and how close she lives to her grandchildren can affect those children’s survival, suggest two new studies published February 7 in Current Biology. One found that, among Finnish families in the 1700s–1800s, the survival rate of young grandchildren increased 30 percent when their maternal grandmothers lived nearby and were 50 to 75 years old. The second study looked at whether that benefit to survival persists even when grandma lives far away. (Spoiler: It doesn’t.)

Other News

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.

Interdisciplinary seminar day with Martin Daly and Gretchen Perry

We were delighted to host Professors Martin Daly and Gretchen Perry for a day of excellent talks, with a particular focus on grandmothering and alloparental behaviour.

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.