Who Actually Fed Ancient Children? It Wasn't Their Mothers

You're working forty years to earn the right to stop working. In the Stone Age, the woman everyone assumed was a burden was the single most productive worker in camp — and the children around that fire did not survive without her. This is the story of the grandmother hypothesis: why human women live decades past fertility, what an anthropologist found when she started timing people with a stopwatch in Tanzania, what 300 years of Finnish and Canadian church records revealed about living grandmothers, and why orca pods follow the oldest female when the salmon run dry. Chapters: 0:00 Forty years to earn your retirement 0:36 The myth that nobody got old 1:14 Why does she exist at all? 2:01 Kristen Hawkes goes to Tanzania 2:23 The hardest workers in camp 3:07 The trap human children create 3:35 What the numbers actually showed 4:07 300 years of church records 5:03 The grandmother hypothesis 5:15 The whales that do the same thing 6:05 The thing that can't be hunted or traded 6:18 The drought nobody under thirty remembers 7:15 "I know where there's water" #ancienthistory #anthropology #humanevolution #archaeology #relationships #anthropoloy 7:44 What we built instead 8:30 A finish line she never had 8:57 Pick up the phone Sources & further reading: Hawkes et al. on Hadza foraging returns; Lahdenperä et al., Nature (2004); Croft, Brent et al. on post-reproductive orca leadership. #ancienthumans #anthropology #humanevolution #grandmother #prehistory #sleep #sleepscience