Menopause from an Integrative Historical and Evolutionary Perspective

The concept of menopause appears only to be found in the modern world. Is menopause then purely a cultural invention? Perhaps women ancestrally did not live long enough to have to worry about it? In fact, humans, like orcas and short-finned pilot whales, have always had substantial female populations living well beyond reproductive age. The possible evolutionary advantage of non-reproductive older females in hunter-gatherer contexts has been referred to as the ‘grandmother hypothesis’ and has been substantiated in several extant hunter-gather cultures. But other studies have been unable to find a greater reproductive fitness in the offspring of grandmothers among historical agrarian populations. It appears that ancient and early-modern medical sources first began to see menopause as inherently pathological in the context of its lost evolutionary advantage with substantial agrarian settlement. On the other hand, the modern view of menopause as a distinct set of inflammatory symptoms emerged only in the context of nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization. What is the truly ancestral way for a woman to pass through this phase of life? In this paper I suggest a few lines of inquiry that might help us to think this through.