To think the menopause makes no sense evolutionarily speaking

[CurdinHenry]

Sure maybe it makes sense that women evolve into a new phase of wisdom and a role that's different from child having and of that. But how come we all seem to run out of the basic chemicals needed to keep our pelvic floor from collapsing? How can we be evolved to be almost certain to get very unwell across time (in our longer years on this planet) if we don't take supplements that have only existed for less than 100 years????

Feel a bit stressed about it.

I was 46 when I went through menopause. Some women go directly into menopause even younger than I was if they have their ovaries removed. The symptoms are immediate and can cause severe health problems. I ended up in severe heart failure. I was lucky enough to know about one of my cardiac conditions so was being monitored anyway, but the decrease in heart function was sudden and drastic - and directly linked to menopause. I wasn’t metabolizing my cardiac meds in a normal way and they had stopped working. Luckily after I started HRT, I began to respond positively again. That is simply one of my symptoms.

@Crushed23- I think the only useful advice is to look after yourself- really, REALLY good nutrition, plenty of sleep, lots and lots of exercise, maintain a healthy weight and avoid stress! Try and put all of that in place long before peri hits so that you don’t feel you suddenly have to make big lifestyle changes at a time when that’s extremely difficult to do.

But nothing guarantees a trouble-free menopause; I suspect much of it is luck/genetics.

I am slim and fit and having an ok time of it in peri, thanks to HRT. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel brilliant, and mental-health wise it’s been a slog, but I’m having an easier time of it than many. 🤞

It makes perfect evolutionary sense. By menopause the eggs we release are produced from very old material and the odds of a new human being physically and genetically healthy decrease as those eggs get older.

Because survival is an aggregate, not individual proposition.

That's not how evolution works as regards babies though.
Evolution doesn't go "if this person has a baby now, they will die and the baby likely to die also". It's still worth it, in evolutionary terms to have babies as long as possible, even if the survival chances of those babies reduces due to infant health or maternal mortality. That's why the vast majority of animals will continue to be able to produce young until death even when it gets to the point it's unhealthy for the mother or the babies.
A very few mammals in nature have an "off switch" for female fertility. All of these mammals live in social, matriarchal family groups. It isn't unreasonable to assume therefore that the same evolutionary advantages for those other mammals to have a menopause also apply to humans. This is backed dup by data that shows that the chances of the offspring (male offspring in killer Wales) having more young themselves increases if their mother stays around them into adulthood.
It's not just about being a grandmother. Those other species are also matriarchal so it might be that having whales that have lived long enough to remember the best fishing places in hard times etc is more advantageous than all females having children until they die. It's bot uncommon for elephant groups to collapse/die when the older matriarchs are poached because they don't have the knowledge to survive.
So in a sense, menopause is the first library.

But evolution doesn't care about making life convenient/perfect. Even guinea pigs become capable of having children before it's healthy for them to do so (and if they have babies too soon they can die). (Likewise the fact that girls get their periods at a certain age does not mean their body is capable of carrying a child without damage at that age (and never has)). At the other end of the scale, evolution really doesn't give a shit if some of the women who go through menopause suffer bad hot flushes, or bladder issues or feel awful. Because that isn't enough to stop menopause being advantageous.

My theory is: we put on weight because we needed a bit of extra padding to survive in the old days when older women would probably get the scraps from the table as we were no longer desirable. We stop having babies so we can help young mothers loo after their broods. We stop giving a shit what people think of us because we become invisible anyway so why make the effort to ingratiate? And we get brittle bones etc because we were due to die soon. Both my grannies died mid sixties. That was quite common until mid 20th century. It's very recent that most women live for decades post meno.

But that backs up the theory that menopause had an evolutionary advantage. There's a paradox: to pass on your genes you need to have children but while childbirth carries a risk of death, it's good for your children (and relatives) survival if you live as long as possible. It means there's an optimum number of times to go through pregnancy before it makes sense to stop rolling the dice and consolidate. Since precise family planning isn't a thing, the body sets a timer instead.

That's all possible. But if you look at the only other species to have the menopause that's not how they operate. It's like when people insist that women gathered and men hunted. Despite the fact there's not a single other mammal species (including omnivores and other primates) that this applies to. It doesn't make it impossible that the reason for the menopause was so we can eat scraps in the corner having fallen to the bottom of the hierarchy. But it's made less likely if you look at how the only other animals to have menopause act.

As a species, humans have gone all-in on neotony. To the extent we have zero near peers in the matter.

As a strategy thus far it seems to have worked. But it has also required all sorts of odd - and possibly unique - biological quirks and oddities.

Oh sure, we could be unique in the reasons for menopause. But, without any other evidence, it wouldn't make sense to assume that the reasons are unique. It's especially risky to make assumptions based on what society looks like now when the environment.is very different (in lots of good ways too) to the evolution part pressures wenwouldnhave evolved traits like menopause under.

(And therefore it's still helpful to look at whales etc for clues).

My theory is: we put on weight because we needed a bit of extra padding to survive in the old days when older women would probably get the scraps from the table as we were no longer desirable. We stop having babies so we can help young mothers loo after their broods.

We put on weight as estrogen levels drop as the body understands we still need some estrogen, and fat helps provide it (along with the adrenal glands, though modern women are often too stressed for their adrenals to manufacture estrogen). A little extra weight provides some cushioning for older bones. It also provides a resource should an older woman fall ill.

It would be insane, with the risks of childbirth and the demands pregnancy has on the human body, for women to keep reproducing until the ends of their lifespans.

Yep. Also I guess there would have been a few ‘wise women’ around (with itchy fannies and extreme irritability), Also extended breastfeeding worked (sort of) as a way to space out children. Our bodies do make sense - just not in today’s world with jobs, nursery fees and pension ages and so forth.

Our bodies do make sense - just not in today’s world with jobs, nursery fees and pension ages and so forth.

Suggesting that the idea that women should remain at home and raise children is an intrinsic part of being human ?

What's home though? I like my house but there isn't anything intrinsically human about living in one, at least not as individual units for nuclear families. Likewise "going out to work" in an office etc isn't intrinsically male or female. It's very different to how we evolved. Which doesn't make it bad, but equally I think the conversations about men naturally do X (breadwinning in this case), women do Y (home make) are flawed. Because the system we built today, that works fairly well, isn't how humans (male and female) evolved.

A couple of thousand years ago you’d probably have been dead by 45 or 50 anyway.

You are still looking at a 2-3000 year post patriarchial system and post warfare and agriculture, where life expectancy dropped significantly for everyone. And a mere blink in the evolution of even modern humans which now seems to have stretched back to around 3-400,000 BCE, never mind archaic human species. The evolutionary traits of menopause were set in place far earlier than this and the blip of what modern life (which I place at around Bronze Age onward) has done to us as a species does not negate that menopause is significvant and gives an evolutionary advantage in the animals it exists in. Namely passing knowledge of food supply, ensuring good nutrition to male progeny who will go off and fertilise many eggs far and wide, and the welfare and extra nurture of direct female line children.

As for why we experience issues to do with it - personally I think its to do with nutrition, psychology, and modern life / pressures to remain youthful, productive and attractive members of society, where age is not appreciated and growing old is almost the worst thing you could do as a woman . It is interesting also, I feel, that prehistoric depictions of women from around 40-3000 BC are generally quite well padded and some most definately older - but you can bet your life that the fat didnt come from sugar and processed fats and carbs.

peak
age of death being warly 20s around childbirth doesn’t mean that if you safely made it through you wouldn’t live a long life

by that logic why put the menopause off till 50? 30 years after peak death age ?

I don't think the former suggests the latter - working away from your children, in environments not suitable for them, is a recent thing in the context of how long we've existed.

A few pps have mentioned this but I wonder about the role of stress making symptoms worse. If I wasn’t having to work full time, raise kids with no village, worry about ageing parents with no village, deal with all the strains of life, ie if I lived in a time when communities and families were more cohesive and money stretched further, I’d be less bothered by night sweats or disturbed sleep. I am Bothered currently because I need to work full pelt so night waking (for example) is hard to cope with and has knock on effects.

I compare it to being on mat leave when I was awake half the night thanks to a baby and utterly relived that I didn’t have to leave the house at 7.30 in ironed clothing with a fully pert brain. Mat leave was hard and busy as hell but I was my own boss. I’m not now. My boss wants me at work at 9am no matter how shit I feel.

100% I didn't think it through. I was thinking that the kids of the women who had them late would die before being able to pass on the no-menopause gene. But in fact those women would also obviously be having kids when they were 15 and stuff, who would most likely survive, so the gene would continue anyway.

Surely home is where the heart is ?

The fact that we somehow stumbled into farming and settling into a geographical and environmental stasis has happened so fast as to rather confound what has been perceived as being the evolutionary process.

One thing to throw into the mix is that the development of brain dramatically removed the need for brawn. And that cuts across sexes. When you start using tools and weapons, sheer brute force is not as essential as a good aim and communication skills.

agriculture and hunter gathering are not a progression though. Its easy to think that civilisation went on a single projectory and where we are now is the natural evolution of humankind and technology. In fact that is very far from the case. Yes, we all started off as some kind of hunting gathering folk, but the demarkation of men out hunting and women back gathering is now looking decidedly dodgy and formed by the majorly male anthropologists who made such sweeping statements. Its a lot more like 'every able bodied in the hunting party out hunting' some people gathering and child rearing, some doing other stuff. There was also a hell of alot of free time. Some coimmunities went to agriculture and returned to hunter gathering. Some peoples - like those who built the huge temple complexes in Golbeki Tepi, were hunter gatherers but also managed this major building projects around 10,000 BC. Some cities were lived in by people with no agriculture at all. Some civilisations were matrilinal. some patriarchial and hierarchal. Some were settled, some were transient and had agriculture.
There is a fantastic book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeba and, David Wengrow which blows this single line of development apart, and women often had a vital role, especially as elders.

agriculture and hunter gathering are not a progression though.

Arguably agriculture was a backwards step for individual humans. You are prey to a lot more very nasty long tail diseases when you all live together and a pathogen doesn't need to rush to get to the next host.

Or so I read years ago.

Was reading a book and saw it referred to as fucktopause because all fucks do indeed pause 😂

Wow! I don't take supplements and nor has my pelvic floor collapsed.