Abstract
The effects of grandparent survival on child survival and mean interbirth interval, both independent of and relative to parent survival, were investigated in a historical population. Families for the data set were reconstituted from the parish and census records of Cambridgeshire, 1770–1861. In a logistic regression analysis, only the mother’s and the maternal grandmother’s survival were found to be significant predictors of child survival. Maternal grandmother’s survival was found to influence child survival both via maternal survival and independent of maternal survival. Grandparent survival was not found to influence mean interbirth interval. These findings are reviewed with respect to other studies of grandmothering, the Grandmother Hypothesis, and the evolutionary significance of human female postreproductive lifespan.
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Gillian Ragsdale is a postgraduate student at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolution Studies (LCHES), Cambridge University, UK, currently investigating the evolution of human social cognition. She was originally a molecular geneticist, and subsisted through the intervening years in educational publishing.
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Ragsdale, G. Grandmothering in Cambridgeshire, 1770–1861. Hum Nat 15, 301–317 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-004-1011-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-004-1011-y