Saturday, May 6, 2023

Grandmothers gave humans longer lifespans

I've seen things along these lines before; they always warm the cockles of my grandmotherly heart*. Aside from the (invaluable, really) babysitting services, and the love, there's all that wisdom.  


Grandmother's Story by Hugues Merle
Help with childcare from grandmothers at an early stage of human history could have resulted in an evolutionary change which caused women to live long past the menopause, researchers said.

Female chimpanzees rarely live beyond their 30s or early 40s, when their fertility typically ends, but a computer simulation showed that the influence of grandmothers could extend their lifespan to human levels within 24,000 to 60,000 years.

A popular theory known as the "Grandmother Hypothesis" (wiki) suggests that older women had an evolutionary benefit by caring for their grandchildren after their childbearing years were over.

The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal, backs up the theory by demonstrating that grandmothers alone, and not other factors like the development of larger brains, could result in women having longer lifespans.

Researchers suggested grandmothers may even have been responsible for increasing humans' brain size by allowing mothers to have larger families, which increased the pressure of natural selection on their children.

Most primates and mammals collect their own food after they have been weaned, but when African forests began to be replaced by dry savannah two million years ago, children were no longer able to forage for themselves.

The Grandmother Theory suggests that older women began performing childcare tasks such as cracking hard nuts or digging up tubers from the dry ground, which allowed their daughters to keep producing and caring for new babies.

This meant long-lived and healthy grandmothers could pass on their genes to more descendants, increasing the number of women who would survive beyond childbearing age.


Mathematicians simulated the impact of childcare from grandmothers on a society of animals which only lived for 25 years after reaching adulthood, similar to chimpanzees in the wild.

They found that thanks to "grandmothering" female chimps would evolve to live for 49 years as adults – a level similar to human hunter-gatherers – within the space of 24,000 to 60,000 years.

Prof Kristen Hawkes of the University of Utah, senior author of the study, said: "Grandmothering was the initial step towards making us who we are."

It resulted in "a whole array of social capacities that are the foundation for the evolution of other distinctly human traits, including pair bonding, bigger brains, learning new skills and our tendency for co-operation," she said.


Thursday, May 4, 2023

Happy Cinco de Mayo

Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!

~Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Alfonso Bedoya bandit character)*

Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy. 

Edward Abbey (attributed) 

Today is Cinco de Mayo, Mexico's great national holiday and the anniversary of the defeat of 6,000 French soldiers by 2,000 Mexicans at the battle of Puebla in 1862. After Mexico had defaulted on its bonds, Britain, France, and Spain made a joint naval demonstration to compel payment. (Embroiled in its own Civil War, the United States was too preoccupied to object.) When negotiations opened, the British and Spanish departed, but France decided to seize on the opportunity to conquer the country and impose Napoleon III's brother-in-law, Maximilian, as emperor.

Édouard Manet's The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (1867)
is one of five versions of his representation
of the execution of the Mexican monarch
Despite the Mexican victory at Puebla, the French eventually prevailed, but by 1867, Maximilian had been overthrown and executed, his demise the subject of a memorable painting (1867-68) by Eduard Manet now in the National Gallery, London.** Some decades later, ruthless Mexican president cum dictator Porfirio Diaz (1830-1915) noted,

"Poor Mexico, so far from God - and so near to the United States."

* N.B. John Huston's classic movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), starred Humphrey Bogart and Tim Holt in a stark tale of greed in the southwestern desert. It won three Academy Awards, and the phrase quoted here has become something of a cult incantation, though most often in the form,

"We ain't got no stinkin' badges..."

** Maximilian's body was later repatriated to Austria, and his sarcophagus can be seen today in the Kapuzinergruft in downtown Vienna, along with those of many other famous Hapsburg monarchs.

Here's a brief History Channel explanation of the holiday:



The text above is adapted from Ed's Quotation of the Day, only available via email - leave your email address in the comments if you'd like to be added to his list. Ed is the author of Hunters and Killers: Volume 1: Anti-Submarine Warfare from 1776 to 1943 and Hunters and Killers: Volume 2: Anti-Submarine Warfare from 1943.

Wednesday, May 3, 2023

May 4th is International Respect for Chickens day: some chicken-related links to help you celebrate

Whether you raise your own or not, you may be interested to know that May 4th is International Respect for Chickens Day.  In celebration, a few chicken related links:

Take a look at this, even if you don't read the whole thing: the famous (and definitive!) Chicken scientific study.

Glamour portraits of chickens from Chickens:


More at the artist's web site, and here's a mini documentary on the poultry portraiture project.

Epic Chick Fight: 2 women reenact Family Guy’s famed chicken fight:


And the original: 


Related posts and links:

Here's an excellent (and cheap!) chicken hat - I have one of these, and it actually quite warm!

This Chinese "Chick Chick" music video is the weirdest thing you'll watch all day.

500 lb chicken from hell: large feathered dinosaur species discovered in North America.

Scientists engineer flu-stopping superchicken.

The history of chickens and eggs: When and why did they get domesticated?

Got more? Leave them in the comments, and I'll update later.