Coprolite Newsletter, September 2004

Grandmothers are now getting much of the credit for all the progress ever made by the human race. Well, that assumption has been popular in our family for years, but the idea is spreading throughout the scientific community too.

Anthropologists call it the “Grandmother Hypothesis.” It seems that humans are the only species whose females live a long time after their reproductive years. Even long-lived animals like elephants and whales keep having young all their lives. We humans came to dominate the world because our ancestors invented menopause and consequently developed grandmotherhood as a career. This freed older women from the dangers and duties of childbearing so that they were available to help nurture their grandchildren, forage for food, and share their wisdom with the tribe.

By studying teeth from ancient skulls, Anthropologist Rachel Caspari from the University of Michigan has traced, over the millenia, what proportion of our predecessors lived to be well past the age of sexual maturity. The numbers gradually rose from the days of the Australopithecines through the early Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. Then, 30,000 years ago, the proportion of older folks suddenly shot up. This coincided with the rapid flowering of human culture at that same time. Dr. Caspari infers that the older population, particularly post-menopausal women, set off a cultural revolution. The development of language, tool-making abilities, and social bonding are all credited to grandmothers.

That’s all well and good. Lord knows, grandmothers certainly deserve a lot of credit. But I feel like asking Dr. Caspari what she thinks grandfathers were doing all that time. Maybe we had a little bit to do with building civilization too.

For example, I think it must have been an early grandfather who figured out how to combine two simple tools—the inclined plane and the lever—to invent the first recliner. Primitive codgers were now able to comfortably keep an eye on things in the cave. This freed grandmothers to forage for roots, young men to hunt game, and young women to take the kids to the park.

While guarding the cave, those early grandfathers undoubtedly traded stories about their youthful hunting exploits, much as we enjoy doing today. Since language was still in its infancy, they illustrated the walls of the cave with pictures of the game they had vanquished. Thus they originated art.

In order to see these cave paintings better, early grandfathers had to figure out how to tame fire and bring it inside. Then they made some of the greatest discoveries of all.

As the various grandfathers sat there boasting of their past hunting days, they enlisted the help of young boys to carry torches over to light up the spot on the cave wall where their particular illustrations were located. Since language was still being developed, they signaled these young helpers by slapping their hands together.

Thus we see that it was grandfathers who not only invented recliners and action pictures on the living room wall, but also devised remote controls to select which of those pictures to show and even an early model of the Clapper.

I think these achievements actually eclipse their later invention of the wheel. That was necessitated by the need to build carts to haul around their heavy primitive golf clubs made from rocks lashed to sticks.

So I think it’s time somebody came up with a Grandfather Hypothesis. We were there too, folks!

––Wayne Adams
wayne@coprolites.com
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