I’m still trying to figure out the key question: what is the ADVANTAGE of women running out of eggs sooner? What disadvantage might there be to having surplus eggs? The article appears not to provide even a hypothests for this.
The article appears not to provide even a hypothests for this.
My theory is that people simply didn’t live as long until very recently. The number of eggs women have were more than adequate for most of human history.
Creating extra eggs and never using them is a waste of resources so over time the number of eggs matched the average lifetime.
Maybe older women had such a high probability of giving birth to babies that had a low probability of surviving that evolution selected for women whose ability to get pregnant cutoff at a certain time.