Gotta Have Grandma

**Ginevra** · #1 (**permalink**) 10-17-2007, 05:32 PM

Archive: Theorists See Evolutionary Advantages In Menopause

Quote:

The Hadza people of northern Tanzania are a small group of hunter-gatherers who share a language, a culture and a distaste for gardening. Time and again, government and church agencies have sought to transmute them into full-time farmers, but the Hazda have always returned to the bush, where they subsist on wild goods like fruits, honey, tubers and game. The terrain is hard and hilly, and so is the life, but on one incomparable resource the foragers can always rely: a pack of old ladies with hearts like young horses.

As Dr. Kristen Hawkes of the University of Utah and her colleagues have found in their extensive studies of the Hadza, women in their 50's, 60's, 70's and beyond are among the most industrious members of the group. They are out in the woods for seven or eight hours a day, gathering more food than virtually any of their comrades.

When a young woman is burdened with a suckling infant and cannot fend for her family, she turns for support, not to her mate, but to a senior female relative -- her mother, an aunt, an elder cousin. It is Grandma, or Grandma-proxy, who keeps the woman's other children in baobab and berries, Grandma who keeps them alive. She is not a sentiment, she is a requirement. As Dr. Hawkes, Dr. James O'Connell of the University of Utah and Dr. Nicholas Blurton Jones of the University of California at Los Angeles report in the latest issue of Current Anthropology, a nursing Hadza woman always has a postmenopausal helper.

yossarian · 10-17-2007, 05:48 PM

uhh yeah... i mean, nowadays, all grandma did was buy me candy and give me money.

eDgE oF iNsAnItY · 10-17-2007, 06:12 PM

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Originally Posted by yossarian

uhh yeah... i mean, nowadays, all grandma did was buy me candy and give me money.

You mean, she never picked berries for you??!! Unheard of!!!

10-17-2007, 06:36 PM

My great-grandmother picked berries for me.

whitney_03 · 10-17-2007, 07:22 PM

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Originally Posted by Girl

My great-grandmother picked berries for me.

Ha! My grandma did that for me too! She had a raspberry bush thing in the backyard and would make sure there were some ready and washed for when I got there.

I love my grandma.
I can relate to this, she lived 200 feet away until I was 10, and then when I was in high school I spent the night with her a lot.

10-18-2007, 05:25 AM

My great-grandmother just took off into the woods and picked blackberries for a pie every summer. She took me with her, but I always ended up eating mine along the way >.>

**Opunaya** · 10-18-2007, 05:37 AM

My grandmas just threatened to beat the hell out of me all the time...

**SeaStone** · 10-18-2007, 11:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Opunaya

My grandmas just threatened to beat the hell out of me all the time...

Ha, my grandma threatens to shave my head.

AccidentalWheelchairSex · 10-24-2007, 01:26 AM

My grandma loved throwing anything remotely easy to take off and throw them at me when I was a prick, like shoes, her wig and sometimes if it's a good day, her knickers.

Ol' Patty · 10-24-2007, 01:48 AM

That article was extremely interesting. Good find!