Long postreproductive human lifespans evolved to transmit accumulated cultural knowledge.
Evidence
Under these conditions, natural selection should favor extending our lives in order to give us time to transmit our accumulated know-how to our children and grandchildren and to make sure they have the time and opportunity to learn what they will need. As individuals, our cultural stock is going up over the decades while our physical skills are going down, as are our abilities to produce high-quality babies. At a certain point, those lines cross, and it’s time to stop reproduction and focus all of our efforts on the current children and grandchildren. … This is why humans, but not other primates, live for decades beyond when we stop reproducing, and even live past when we stop being economically productive. This longevity not only emerges in modern societies, but has also now been shown among hunter-gatherers and other small-scale societies, and likely dates back tens or even hundreds of thousands of years into the Paleolithic. By contrast, chimpanzees and other primates do not possess a long postreproductive life. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 446
Categorization
- XREF: Connect to evolutionary life-history theory and the grandmother hypothesis literature on human longevity. — connects to: Cultural accumulation made individual ingenuity insufficient for survival.; Elders gain prestige because age signals accumulated cultural knowledge and wisdom. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 442; Humans evolved specifically to absorb culture along with its prejudgments — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 353 (+9 more)
Broader Connections
- Humans evolved specifically to absorb culture along with its prejudgments
#expands(0.78) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 353 - Enslaved women transmitted cultural knowledge to ensure survival across generations
#exemplifies(0.74) — Stella Dadzie, A Kick in the Belly- Women, Slavery and…, 331 - Human planetary colonization rests on culturally learned adaptations, not just genetics.
#corroborates(0.72)