“When you add helpful grandmothering, at the beginning, almost nobody is living past their fertility,” explains Hawkes. “And yet just those few, those few who are still around at the end of their fertility, that’s enough for selection to begin to shift the life history from an apelike one to a humanlike one. We end up with something that looks like just what we see in modern hunter-gatherers.” All it would have taken in those early days of human evolutionary history was a few good grandmothers.
