Demographic and hormonal evidence for menopause in wild chimpanzees

Among mammals, post-reproductive life spans are currently documented only in humans and a few species of toothed whales. Here we show that a post-reproductive life span exists among wild chimpanzees in the Ngogo community of Kibale National Park, Uganda. Post-reproductive representation was 0.195, i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science
Main Authors: Wood, Brian M., Negrey, Jacob D., Brown, Janine L., Deschner, Tobias, Thompson, Melissa Emery, Gunter, Sholly, Mitani, John C., Watts, David P., Langergraber, Kevin E.
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2023
Subjects:
toothed whales
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.add5473
https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.add5473
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Summary:Among mammals, post-reproductive life spans are currently documented only in humans and a few species of toothed whales. Here we show that a post-reproductive life span exists among wild chimpanzees in the Ngogo community of Kibale National Park, Uganda. Post-reproductive representation was 0.195, indicating that a female who reached adulthood could expect to live about one-fifth of her adult life in a post-reproductive state, around half as long as human hunter-gatherers. Post-reproductive females exhibited hormonal signatures of menopause, including sharply increasing gonadotropins after age 50. We discuss whether post-reproductive life spans in wild chimpanzees occur only rarely, as a short-term response to favorable ecological conditions, or instead are an evolved species-typical trait as well as the implications of these alternatives for our understanding of the evolution of post-reproductive life spans.

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