ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2018
Evolutionary demography of age at last birth: integrating approaches from human behavioural ecology and cultural evolution.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Exploring the shifting landscape of delayed motherhood in India: a comprehensive analysis using joinpoint and age-period-cohort analysis.BMC women's health · 2025Article
- Natural selection on reproductive timing varies by education in twentieth-century Estonia.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Changes in age at last birth and its determinants in India.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Post-marital residence patterns and the timing of reproduction: evidence from a matrilineal society.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Cultural change beyond adoption dynamics: Evolutionary approaches to the discontinuation of contraception.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
- Breastfeeding Duration and the Social Learning of Infant Feeding Knowledge in Two Maya Communities.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2020Article
- Modelling cultural selection on biological fitness to integrate social transmission and adaptive explanations for human behaviour.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Cultural group selection and human cooperation: a conceptual and empirical review.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Review
- The evolution of female-biased kinship in humans and other mammals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Cultural evolutionary theory and human behavioural ecology offer different, but compatible approaches to understanding human demographic behaviour. For much of their 30 history, these approaches have been deployed in parallel, with few explicit attempts to integrate them empirically. In this paper, we test hypotheses drawn from both approaches to explore how reproductive behaviour responds to cultural changes among Mosuo agriculturalists of China. Specifically, we focus on how age at last birth (ALB) varies in association with temporal shifts in fertility policies, spatial variation and kinship ecologies. We interpret temporal declines in ALB as plausibly consistent with demographic front-loading of reproduction in light of fertility constraints and later ages at last birth in matrilineal populations relative to patrilineal ones as consistent with greater household cooperation for reproductive purposes in the former. We find little evidence suggesting specific transmission pathways for the spread of norms regulating ALB, but emphasize that the rapid pace of change strongly suggests that learning processes were involved in the general decline in ALB over time. The different predictions of models we employ belie their considerable overlap and the potential for a synthetic approach to generate more refined tests of evolutionary hypotheses of demographic behaviour.This article is part of the theme issue 'Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution'.
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