The tempo of human childhood: a maternal foot on the accelerator, a paternal foot on the brake

Relative to the life history of other great apes, that of humans is characterized by early weaning and short interbirth intervals (IBIs). We propose that in modern humans, birth until adrenarche, or the rise in adrenal androgens, developmentally corresponds to the period from birth until weaning in great apes and ancestral hominins. According to this hypothesis, humans achieved short IBIs by subdividing ancestral infancy into a nurseling phase, during which offspring fed at the breast, and a weanling phase, during which offspring fed specially prepared foods. Imprinted genes influence the timing of human weaning and adrenarche, with paternally expressed genes promoting delays in childhood maturation and maternally expressed genes promoting accelerated maturation. These observations suggest that the tempo of human development has been shaped by consequences for the fitness of kin, with faster development increasing maternal fitness at a cost to child fitness. The effects of imprinted genes suggest that the duration of the juvenile period (adrenarche until puberty) has also been shaped by evolutionary conflicts within the family.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Evolutionary Anthropology (print)

• Publication date

  2018-03-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1002/evan.21579PMID 29575348PMCID 5947556
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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