‘The one I’m betting on really does make grandmothering the key to this special characteristic of our longevity,’ states Hawkes. For the patriarch hypothesis to work, she explains, there would have to be at least a few old men alive in the beginning to make these patriarchies happen in the first place, and the fact that our primate cousins don’t have any elderly chimps or apes among them raises the question of where on earth these older men might have come from in large enough numbers. ‘The problem with his patriarch hypothesis is he has to somehow get to the place he wants to start,’ she
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