ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Maternal care leads to the evolution of long, slow lives.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Animal Social Network Structures Across the Fast-Slow Continuum.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Affiliative behaviours regulate allostasis development and shape biobehavioural trajectories in horses.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Sexual selection drives sex difference in adult life expectancy across mammals and birds.Science advances · 2025Article
- Slowly but Surely: Larger Brains Improve Immature Survival in Primates.American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Maternal care leads to the evolution of long, slow lives.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Animals, and mammals in particular, vary widely in their "pace of life," with some species living long lives and reproducing infrequently (slow life histories) and others living short lives and reproducing often (fast life histories). These species also vary in the importance of maternal care in offspring fitness: In some species, offspring are fully independent of their mothers following a brief period of nutritional input, while others display a long period of continued dependence on mothers well after nutritional dependence. Here, we hypothesize that these two axes of variation are causally related to each other, such that extended dependence of offspring on maternal presence leads to the evolution of longer lives at the expense of reproduction. We use a combination of deterministic modeling and stochastic agent-based modeling to explore how empirically observed links between maternal survival and offspring fitness are likely to shape the evolution of mortality and fertility. Each of our modeling approaches leads to the same conclusion: When maternal survival has a strong impact on the survival of offspring and grandoffspring, populations evolve longer lives with less frequent reproduction. Our results suggest that the slow life histories of humans and other primates as well as other long-lived, highly social animals such as hyenas, whales, and elephants are partially the result of the strong maternal care that these animals display. We have designed our models to be readily parameterized with demographic data that are routinely collected by long-term researchers, which will facilitate more thorough testing of our hypothesis.
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