Grandparents advanced civilization.......................~Wise

Grandparents advanced civilization, report says

30,000-year-old teeth help experts find links to growth of innovation

By Lee Bowman / Scripps Howard News Service

WASHINGTON — A dramatic change took place among the human population some 30,000 years ago that researchers think is closely associated with the rise of civilization and innovation in many fields. The change? More grandparents.

Anthropologists used samples of the wisdom teeth from pre-humans and humans over several million years to determine that the number of people living to old age more than quadrupled during that time.

“There has been a lot of speculation about what gave modern humans their evolutionary advantage. This research provides a simple explanation for which there is no concrete evidence: Modern humans were older and wiser,” said Rachel Caspari, an assistant research scientist at the University of Michigan’s Anthropology Museum in Ann Arbor and co-author of the research, published Monday in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

Other researchers who have studied modern tribes suggest that grandfathers played a role in watching and educating the young, passing along knowledge that hunting, and later farming, dads may have been too busy to give in detail.

Increased survivorship also promoted population growth, the researchers argue in the paper, since people living longer are more likely to have more children themselves and since they also make contributions to the reproductive success of their offspring.

Caspari and co-author Sang-Hee Lee of the University of California-Riverside argue that this increase in longevity in the late Stone Age was “a fundamental demographic component tied to the population expansion and related behavioral innovations associated with modern humans.”

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