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Human evolution: average age at conception by gender revealed in study

By Sara Molina

Posted January 11, 2023

conception

Graph depicting the average conception age. (The Hahn lab)

A recent study from IU researchers pinpoints the average age at which women and men had children throughout human history.

The study builds off widely known information regarding a proportionate increase between human mutations and parental ages. However, this new information helps scholars to better understand and date historic evolutionary events.

“What has long been known is that the number of mutations changes with the age of the parent,” said first author Richard Wang. “But what was unique about our study was … we were able to then calculate the average age at which humans had children at different intervals throughout history.”

This calculation, which offers insight into how environmental changes will impact mankind in the future, was recently published in Science Advances.

Read more: Human Evolution And Climate Change

According to the research, the average age humans had children (also known as the generation time) over the last 250,000 years is 26.9 years old.

While the average generation time has increased in the last 500 generations because humans are waiting to have kids at older ages, men continue to become fathers at an older age than women become mothers.

This gendered age gap has slightly decreased recently, because mothers are having children at older ages. Despite this, the generation time for mothers has still remained more consistent than it has for fathers, Wang said.

“The age at which mothers can have children - there’s a big drop off in fertility … whereas paternal age of fertility doesn't,” he said. “There’s no steep menopause kind of decline, so older fathers can keep having kids.”

As the study’s first author, Wang worked with additional researchers from IU and Baylor to piece together history. The team’s original goal was to better understand how conception age affects genetic mutations in children, but over the year it took to conduct the research, they discovered gender’s correlation to the subject.

Detecting decreases and increases in average generation times can date historic events in humans. This study paves the way for additional research to be done on human migrations and evolution.

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