Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Science. 2023 Oct 27;382(6669):eadd5473. doi: 10.1126/science.add5473.
Among mammals, post-reproductive life spans are currently documented only in humans and a few species of toothed whales. Here we show that a post-reproductive life span exists among wild chimpanzees in the Ngogo community of Kibale National Park, Uganda. Post-reproductive representation was 0.195, indicating that a female who reached adulthood could expect to live about one-fifth of her adult life in a post-reproductive state, around half as long as human hunter-gatherers. Post-reproductive females exhibited hormonal signatures of menopause, including sharply increasing gonadotropins after age 50. We discuss whether post-reproductive life spans in wild chimpanzees occur only rarely, as a short-term response to favorable ecological conditions, or instead are an evolved species-typical trait as well as the implications of these alternatives for our understanding of the evolution of post-reproductive life spans.
在哺乳动物中，目前仅在人类和少数几种齿鲸中记录到了生殖后寿命。在这里，我们表明，在乌干达基巴莱国家公园恩戈格社区的野生黑猩猩中存在生殖后寿命。生殖后代表现为 0.195，这表明一个成年的雌性黑猩猩可以预期在生殖后状态下度过其成年生活的大约五分之一，大约是人类狩猎采集者的一半。生殖后雌性表现出绝经的激素特征，包括在 50 岁后促性腺激素急剧增加。我们讨论了野生黑猩猩的生殖后寿命是否只是偶尔发生，作为对有利生态条件的短期反应，还是相反，这是一种进化的物种典型特征，以及这些替代方案对我们理解生殖后寿命进化的意义。
