ArticleScientific reports2021
Offspring fertility and grandchild survival enhanced by maternal grandmothers in a pre-industrial human society.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neural circuits for mammalian parental behaviour.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Resources modify the associations between kin and fertility in historical Finland.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Age- and sex-dependent associations between the number of older siblings and early-life survival in pre-industrial humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Demography of grandmothering: a case study in Agta foragers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Close and more distant relatives are associated with child mortality risk in historical Finland.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Investment by maternal grandmother buffers children against the impacts of adverse early life experiences.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Grandmother effects over the Finnish demographic transition.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Maternal grandmothers buffer the effects of ethnic discrimination among pregnant Latina mothers.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Grandmother presence improved grandchild survival against childhood infections but not vaccination coverage in historical Finns.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Post-marital residence patterns and the timing of reproduction: evidence from a matrilineal society.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- An evolutionary perspective on the association between grandmother-mother relationships and maternal mental health among a cohort of pregnant Latina women.Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society · 2023Article
- The interplay of grandparental investment according to the survival status of other grandparent types.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- On maternity and the stronger immune response in women.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Fighting force and experience combine to determine contest success in a warlike mammal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Matrilateral bias of grandparental investment in grandchildren persists despite the grandchildren's adverse early life experiences.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- An evolutionary perspective on kin care directed up the generations.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Does Parental Investment Shape Adult Children's Fertility Intentions? Findings From a German Family Panel.Frontiers in sociology · 2021Article
- Grandparental co-residence and grandchild survival: the role of resource competition in a pre-industrial population.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Help is directed towards kin in many cooperative species, but its nature and intensity can vary by context. Humans are one of few species in which grandmothers invest in grandchildren, and this may have served as an important driver of our unusual life history. But helping behaviour is hardly uniform, and insight into the importance of grandmothering in human evolution depends on understanding the contextual expression of helping benefits. Here, we use an eighteenth-nineteenth century pre-industrial genealogical dataset from Finland to investigate whether maternal or paternal grandmother presence (lineage relative to focal individuals) differentially affects two key fitness outcomes of descendants: fertility and survival. We found grandmother presence shortened spacing between births, particularly at younger mother ages and earlier birth orders. Maternal grandmother presence increased the likelihood of focal grandchild survival, regardless of whether grandmothers had grandchildren only through daughters, sons, or both. In contrast, paternal grandmother presence was not associated with descendants' fertility or survival. We discuss these results in terms of current hypotheses for lineage differences in helping outcomes.
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