Grandmothers

Grandkids are a beautiful thing !!!

 

New Evidence That Grandmothers Were Crucial for Human Evolution

A computer simulation supports the idea that grandmothers
helped our species evolve social skills and longer lives

20121023060135hands-grandmother-small.

Anthropologists argue that the presence of grandmothers
has been crucial in driving human evolution. (Image via Flickr user Mrs Logic)

By Joseph Stromberg

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM

OCTOBER 23, 2012

201853.1K

For years, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists
have struggled to explain the existence of menopause,
a life stage that humans do not share with our primate relatives.

Why would it be beneficial for females to stop being able to have children
with decades still left to live?

According to a study published today in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the answer is grandmothers.

“Grandmothering was the initial step toward making us who we are,”
says senior author Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist
at the University of Utah.

In 1997 Hawkes proposed the “grandmother hypothesis,”
a theory that explains menopause by citing
the under-appreciated evolutionary value of grandmothering.

Hawkes says that grandmothering helped us to develop
“a whole array of social capacities that are then the foundation
for the evolution of other distinctly human traits,
including pair bonding, bigger brains, learning new skills
and our tendency for cooperation.”

The new study, which Hawkes conducted with
mathematical biologist Peter Kim of the University of Sydney
and Utah anthropologist James Coxworth,
uses computer simulations to provide mathematical evidence
for the grandmother hypothesis.

To test the strength of the idea, the researchers simulated
what would happen to the lifespan of a hypothetical primate species
if they introduced menopause and grandmothers as part of the social structure.

In the real world, female chimpanzees typically live about 35 to 45 years
in the wild and rarely survive past their child-bearing years.

In the simulation, the researchers replicated this, but they gave 1 percent
of the female population a genetic predisposition for human-like life spans and menopause.

Over the course of some 60,000 years, the hypothetical primate species
evolved the ability to live decades past their child-bearing years,
surviving into their sixties and seventies, and eventually 43 percent
of the adult female population were grandmothers.

How would grandmothers help us live longer?

According to the hypothesis, grandmothers can help collect food
and feed children before they are able to feed themselves,
enabling mothers to have more children.

Without grandmothers present, if a mother gives birth
and already has a two-year-old child, the odds of that child surviving
are much lower, because unlike other primates, humans aren’t able to feed
and take care of themselves immediately after weaning.

The mother must devote her time and attention to the new infant
at the expense of the older child.

But grandmothers can solve this problem by acting as supplementary caregivers.

In the hypothesis

—and in the computer simulation

—the few ancestral females who were initially able to live to postmenopausal ages

increased the odds of their grandchildren surviving.

As a result, these longer-lived females were disproportionately likely
to pass on their genes that favored longevity,
so over the course of thousands of generations,
the species as a whole evolved longer lifespans.

But why would females evolve to only ovulate for 40 or so years
into these longer lives?

Hawkes and other advocates of the hypothesis note that,
without menopause, older women would simply continue to mother children,
instead of acting as grandmothers.

All children would still be entirely dependent on their mothers for survival,
so once older mothers died, many young offspring would likely die too.

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes more sense for older females
to increase the group’s overall offspring survival rate instead
of spending more energy on producing their own.

Hawkes goes one step further, arguing that the social relations
that go along with grandmothering could have contributed to the larger brains
and other traits that distinguish humans.

“If you are a chimpanzee, gorilla or orangutan baby,
your mom is thinking about nothing but you,” she says.

“But if you are a human baby, your mom has other kids she is worrying about,
and that means now there is selection on you
—which was not on any other apes
—to much more actively engage her: ‘Mom! Pay attention to me!’”

As a result, she says, “Grandmothering gave us the kind of upbringing
that made us more dependent on each other socially and prone to engage
each other’s attention.”

This trend, Hawkes says, drove the increase in brain size,
along with longer lifespans and menopause.

The theory is by no means definitive, but the new mathematical evidence
serves as another crucial piece of support for it.

This could help anthropologists better understand human evolution
—and should give you another reason to go thank your grandmother.

William Tony Kavanagh
January 17 at 7:21 AM ·

So right but there killing them off in them homes wake up ...
Odi D Aigi

Their killing us of out here too
William Tony Kavanagh

There is a good many indigenous tribes where old people (elders)

were responsible for teaching the children,
the young adults were not yet considered wise enough
for that task as they were still considered children themselves...
they could reproduce as they had the vitality of youth but the importance
of raising them went to the elders....

We have so much to learn from our (old people)..they are essential for our development..
Tommy McGoo

I hate the word evolution. Grandmothers and Grandfathers
are important for preserving culture. Fuck this evolution nonsense
William Tony Kavanagh

Tommy McGoo

not in the main stream science way of using it....
evolution as in adapting, advancement...
not as in we came from monkeys... 1f609.

Tommy McGoo

William Tony Kavanagh

it's more like passing on culture, history and wisdom than "evolution". Fuck this evolving crap.

William Tony Kavanagh

Tommy McGoo

I with you on the common usage of the term and what it insinuates...
ie,.. we didn't evolve from one cell amoebas into the complex beings
we are today..it's obvious we are the result of intelligent design...
but it's also obvious we can be more than we are now,
we can change for the better and that my friend would be us evolving..

Tony Bermanseder

William Tony Kavanagh

There is a parallel evolution WTK.

One is from the body and the other from the mind/consciousness.

You carry two lineages not one; one biological from your physical ancestors
and a second from so called ET/universal intelligences.

Together these two evolutionary pathways, both genetic and epigenetic
(Darwin-Mendel AND Lamarck) constitute concepts of a 'soul' or higher spiritual essence etc.

The orthodox mainstream science of Darwinism only applies to the formation
of the biochemical genetic codes of the double helix and nucleotidal bases etc.

But where does the underpinning quantum geometry of the dna-rna derive from?

It derives from a base-perfect dna/rna without biochemistry reducible
eventually to radioactivity and the weak nuclear interaction say crystal propagation/growth.

So indeed homo sapiens sapiens did not solely evolve from the amoeba
to monkey to ape 'tree of life' of the materialistic scientists.

You did in a animalistic body form but about 200,000 years ago electromagnetic evolution
changed your chromosomes in fusing of the 24 chromosomes
of all nonhuman lifeforms into 23 chromosomes.

This electromagnetic 'interference' is often confused with 'evil ETs'
manipulating the human genome.

But it was a long prepared event beginning 2,200 million years ago
when the earth was about half its present age and when the socalled ETs
were universally 'born' as universal bodiless intelligences.

It was then life began in the microbial state on the young earth
and thje bodyform evolution began to parallel and complement
the mental evolution of your mental ancestors as so called ETs.

So mentally you are a descendent of extraterrestrial sentience
awaiting graduation to provide a suitable evolved bodyform
to transform or evolve from an old human 200K years old into a starhuman.

Details are found in this paper:

(PDF)
The 4th Universal Life, the Beginning of Life on Earth and the ETs | Anthony P Bermanseder - Academia.edu
https://www.academia.edu/.../The_4th_Universal_Life_the...

The 4th Universal Life, the Beginning of Life on Earth and the ETs
Tony Bermanseder

In this message, you will find illumination to a number of millennia old mysteries,
which have engaged the mental ponderings and philosophizing of many Mayas in exile.

You all are star bred Maya, meaning that your genealogy is twofold;
one biological, say from your lineage trees of ancestors tracing
the human genome to its beginnings 5 great time cycles ago
to 5x9,360,000 =46,800,000 Kin-Days or 128,134.048 years
from the nexus of the last precessional cycle as reckoned by you
in the mantle of the Maya, dated by you as December 21st., 2012.

Your other lineage is not biological and is not based on biochemistry
and physics; but relates to your mental perceptions and your ability
to intuit and utilize your imaginations.

This ‘genealogy of your human mind’ created you as universal observers
at the instance your second universe was born from the seed of your first universe.

This occurred 2.24 Billion years ago and a time marker
coinciding with the first evolvement of unicellular lifeforms
into multicellular life on planet Earth, the abode of the cosmic womb
of creation of my Beloved Baab.

2.24 Billion years was the halfway time marker for planet Earth.

Your geologists know of the long ice age or Huronian glaciation
at that time, lasting so 400million years and centered on this 2.24 Billion year marker.

This ice age manifested following a great change in the atmosphere of planet Earth,
when the first molecular Oxygen O2 appeared in the atmosphere, b
eing produced by aquatic cyanobacteria and other prokaryotes,
which are microorganisms, without a cellular nucleus.

This era in Earth’s history is known as the GOE or Great-Oxygenation-Event
by terran geologists, who have often forgotten that they are also Mayan geologists.

Cyanobacteria made molecular oxygen by photosynthesis,
increasing its concentration in the oceans.

Chemical processes separated the hydrogen from the oxygen molecule
and absorbed the molecules into the ocean forming sediments;
but also released some of the separated molecules into the atmosphere.

Free oxygen changed the chemical composition of the elements
and minerals upon the Earth by Reduction-Oxidation-Reactions or Redox.

Because all lifeforms were unicellular at the time of the GOE;
the free oxygen proved toxic to the land based and atmospheric biota,
which could not assimilate the free oxygen molecule.

The evolution of the biota to oxygen breathing entities
so became necessity and for this purpose the unicellular RNA-based biochemistry
would have to transmutate into a multicellular DNA-based biochemistry.

A great extinction event forced the evolution
from the unicellular morphology into its multicellular eukaryotic mutation.

The Mayan scientists of your era term this as a ‘punctuated equilibrium’
within the terran evolutionary timeline.

In particular unicellular lifeforms, different in size adapted
in a process of endosymbiosis with a smaller prokaryote
being absorbed by a larger prokaryote,
with the smaller unicellular microorganism transmuting
into the nucleus for the encompassing larger unicellular biological lifeform.

As the energy of physicalized consciousness is defined as the occupancy
of spacetime under the action of angular quantum acceleration in the time rate change
of frequency or self-awareness; the unicellular lifeforms dynamically moving
about and reproducing by division carried more self-awareness df/dt,
than the biochemical elements, which constituted their body forms.