It is not obvious why selection should favor menopause or the continued survival of individuals that can no longer reproduce. The famous Grandmother Hypothesis had been used to explain the evolutionary significance of menopause. A new study conducted on the Ngogo chimpanzees community of wild chimpanzees in Uganda challenges this hypothesis. Science 27 Oct 2023 Vol 382, Issue 6669 DOI: 10.1126/science.add547
I’d just like to drawn attention to this sentence from the accompanying Nature article.
So, if you’re wondering why we hadn’t found out yet, learning this involved camping deep in an uninhabited rainforest and waiting for an elderly chimp to drain her bladder on you.
It’s funny to think to what extent researchers have to go to gather data. I will draw your attention to a journal article I came across recently. I am linking to my post as well as the article itself. I think you will find it interesting. It’s called “hydrodynamics of defecation” published in Soft Matter.
The article: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2017/sm/c6sm02795d#!divCitation
The post: https://literature.cafe/post/3089296