Why do humans experience menopause? It’s a question that some women going through the symptoms might have asked themselves more than once.
Why do humans experience menopause? It’s a question that some women going through the symptoms might have asked themselves more than once.
Scientists are also baffled. From an evolutionary perspective, animals generally take every chance they can get to have as many offspring as possible to boost their odds of survival.
So why have some species evolved to have menopause, in which females live many years after they stop being able to reproduce?
That there are so few other examples in the animal kingdom only deepens the mystery.
Out of 5,000 mammals, just five species of whales with teeth—including killer whales, beluga whales and narwhals—are the only others known to have females that regularly live long after they stop reproducing.
However plenty of other toothed whales, such as dolphins, do not experience menopause.
By looking at the differences between these two groups, a UK-led team of researchers sought to discover why some whales evolved to get menopause—and what this could tell us about ourselves.
Despite our many differences, humans share a “convergent life history” with these ocean giants that led to the independent evolution of menopause, the researchers concluded in a study published in Nature on Wednesday.
Their results tied together several existing hypotheses.
