Yet another cruel fact is that infants of older mothers are themselves increasingly unlikely to survive or be healthy because of age-related increases in the risks of abortion, stillbirth, low fetal weight, and genetic defects. For instance, the risk of a fetus carrying the genetic condition known as Down's syndrome increases with the mother's age, from one in two thousand births for a mother under thirty, one in three hundred for a mother between the ages of thirty-five and thirty-nine, and one in fifty for a forty-three-year-old mother, to the grim odds of one in ten for a mother in her late forties.
Thus, as a woman gets older, she is likely to have accumulated more children; she has also been caring for them longer, so she is putting a bigger investment at risk with each successive pregnancy. But her chances of dying in or after childbirth, and the chances that the fetus or infant will die or be damaged, also increase. In effect, the older mother is taking on more risk for less potential gain. That's one set of factors that would tend to favor human female menopause and that would paradoxically result in a woman ending up with more surviving children by giving birth to fewer children. Natual selection has not programmed menopause into men because of three more cruel facts: men never die in childbirth and rarely die while copulating, and they are less likely than mothers to exhaust themselves caring for infants.
A hypothetically nonmenopausal old woman who died in childbirth, or while caring for an infant, would thereby be throwing away even more than her investment in her previous children. That is because a woman's children eventually begin producing children of their own, and those children count as part of the woman's prior investment. Especially in traditional societies, a woman's survival is important not only to her children but also to her grandchildren.
That extended role of postmenopausal women has been explored by Kristen Hawkes, the anthropologist whose re-search on men's roles I discussed in chapter 5. Hawkes and her colleagues studied foraging by women of different ages among the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. The women who devoted the most time to gathering food (especially roots, honey, and fruit) were postmenopausal women. Those hardworking Hadza grandmothers put in an impressive seven hours per day, compared to a mere three hours for teenagers and new brides and four and a half hours for married women with young children. As one might expect, foraging returns (measured in pounds of food gathered per hour) increased with age and experience, so that mature women achieved higher returns than teenagers, but, interestingly, the grandmothers' returns were still as high as those of women in their prime. The combination of more foraging hours and an unchanged foraging efficiency meant that the postmenopausal grandmothers brought in more food per day than any of the younger groups of women, even though their large harvests were greatly in excess of what was required to meet their own personal needs and they no longer had dependent young children to feed.
Hawkes and her colleagues observed that the Hadza grandmothers were sharing their excess food harvest with close relatives, such as their grandchildren and grown children. As a strategy for transforming food calories into pounds of baby, it would be more efficient for an older woman to donate the calories to grandchildren and grown children rather than to infants of her own (even if she still could give birth) because the older mother's fertility would be decreasing with age anyway, whereas her own children' would be young adults at peak fertility. Naturally, this food-sharing argument does not constitute the sole reproductive contribution of postmenopausal women in traditional societies. A grandmother also baby-sits her grandchildren, thereby helping her adult children churn out more babies bearing the grandmother's genes. In addition, grandmothers lend their social status to their grandchildren, as to their children.
If one were playing God or Darwin and trying to decide whether to make older women undergo menopause or remain fertile, one would draw up a balance sheet, contrasting the benefits of menopause in one column with its costs in the other column. The costs of menopause are the potential children that a woman forgoes by undergoing menopause. The potential benefits include avoiding the increased risk of death due to childbirth and parenting at an advanced age, and gaining the benefit of improved survival for one's grandchildren and prior children. The sizes of those benefits depends on many details: How large is the risk of death in and after childbirth? How much does that risk increase with age? How large would the risk of death be at the same age even without children or the burden of parenting? How rapidly does fertility decrease with age before menopause? How rapidly would it continue to decrease in an aging woman who did not undergo menopause? All these factors are bound to differ between societies and are not easy to estimate. Hence anthropologists remain undecided whether the two considerations that I have discussed so far-investing in grandchildren and protecting one's prior investment in existing children-suffice to offset menopause's foreclosed option of further children and thus to explain the evolution of human female menopause.
But there is still one more virtue of menopause, one that has received little attention. That is the importance of old people to their entire tribe in preliterate societies, which constituted every human society in the world from the time of human origins until the rise of writing in Mesopotamia around 3300 b.c. Textbooks of human genet-ics regularly assert that natural selection cannot weed out mutations tending to cause damaging effects of age in old people. Supposedly there can be no selection against such mutations because old people are said to be “postrepro-ductive.” I believe that such assertions overlook an essen-tial fact that distinguishes humans from most animal species. No human, except a hermit, is ever truly postre-productive in the sense of being unable to benefit the survival and reproduction of other people bearing one's genes. Yes, I grant that if any orangutans lived long enough in the wild to become sterile, they would count as postre-productive, since orangutans other than mothers with one young offspring tend to be solitary. I also grant that the contributions of very old people to modern literate societies tend to decrease with age-a new phenomenon at the root of the enormous problems that old age now poses, both for the elderly themselves and for the rest of society. Today, we moderns get most of our information through writing, television, or radio. We find it impossible to conceive of the overwhelming importance of elderly people in preliterate societies as repositories of information and experience.
Here is an example of that role. In my field studies of bird ecology on New Guinea and adjacent Southwest Pacific islands, I live among people who traditionally had been without writing, depended on stone tools, and subsisted by farming and fishing supplemented by much hunting and gathering. I am constantly asking villagers to toll me the names of local species of birds, animals, and other plants in their local language, and to tell me what they know about each species. It turns out that New Guineans and Pacific islanders possess an enormous fund of traditional biological knowledge, including names for a thousand or more species, plus information about each habitat, behavior, ecology, and usefulness to humans. All that information is important because wild plants and animals traditionally furnished much of the people's food and all of their building materials, medicines, and decorations.
Again and again, when I ask a question about some rare bird, I find that only the older hunters know the answer, and eventually I ask a question that stumps even them. The hunters reply, “We have to ask the old man.[1]” They then take me to a hut, inside of which is an old man or woman, often blind with cataracts, barely able to walk, toothless, and unable to eat any food that hasn't been prechewed by someone else. But that old person is the tribe's library. Because the society traditionally lacked writing, that old person knows much more about the local environment than anyone else and is the sole source of accurate knowledge about events that happened long ago. Out comes the rare bird's name, and a description of it.