maximus otter
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The length of a specific generation can tell us a lot about the biology and social organization of humans. Now, researchers at Indiana University can determine the average age that women and men had children throughout human evolutionary history with a new method they developed using DNA mutations.
"Through our research on modern humans, we noticed that we could predict the age at which people had children from the types of DNA mutations they left to their children," said study co-author Matthew Hahn Professor of biology at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at IU Bloomington. "We then applied this model to our human ancestors to determine what age our ancestors procreated."
According to the study, the average age that humans had children throughout the past 250,000 years is 26.9. Furthermore, fathers were consistently older, at 30.7 years on average, than mothers, at 23.2 years on average, but the age gap has shrunk in the past 5,000 years, with the study's most recent estimates of maternal age averaging 26.4 years. The shrinking gap seems to largely be due to mothers having children at older ages.
Other than the recent uptick in maternal age at childbirth, the researchers found that parental age has not increased steadily from the past and may have dipped around 10,000 years ago because of population growth coinciding with the rise of civilization.
https://phys.org/news/2023-01-reveals-average-age-conception-men.html
maximus otter
"Through our research on modern humans, we noticed that we could predict the age at which people had children from the types of DNA mutations they left to their children," said study co-author Matthew Hahn Professor of biology at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at IU Bloomington. "We then applied this model to our human ancestors to determine what age our ancestors procreated."
According to the study, the average age that humans had children throughout the past 250,000 years is 26.9. Furthermore, fathers were consistently older, at 30.7 years on average, than mothers, at 23.2 years on average, but the age gap has shrunk in the past 5,000 years, with the study's most recent estimates of maternal age averaging 26.4 years. The shrinking gap seems to largely be due to mothers having children at older ages.
Other than the recent uptick in maternal age at childbirth, the researchers found that parental age has not increased steadily from the past and may have dipped around 10,000 years ago because of population growth coinciding with the rise of civilization.
https://phys.org/news/2023-01-reveals-average-age-conception-men.html
maximus otter
