Yes it is.
I'm not a biologist, but I have three good challenges to this theory:
1. Why doesn't male fertility have an age limit? A 20 year old honey will get tired of her 60 year old sugar daddy well before he turns 80.
2. Out of all mammals, human pregnancy is the hardest because we are bipedal. I theorize that menopause is for survival ... pregnancy is relatively harder on human females. Ending the ability to become pregnant when strength begins to wane allows females to live longer.
3. Until very recently, the human lifespan was about 35 years. Did menopause exist 5000 years ago? I am guessing that the limit on the number of eggs in the ovary is related to the rapid increase in the human lifespan and evolution hasn't caught up.
Because clearly evolution is pushing us in the direction of a bunch of single moms with kids whose dads are all dead. /sarc
Women have enough eggs in their ovaries to continue ovulation well in to their second century.
The eggs simply stop maturing after menopause.
My theory would be this: the older the woman is, the higher the risk of genetic defects (we see that now with Down’s Syndrome). The more genetically defective babies that are born (not all defects result in lack of reproduction) the more the genetic viability of the entire tribe is reduced, and thus the less likely that the tribe will survive. For those tribes where women got sterile around the age of the onset of high risk for birth defects, the gene pool is protected and elevated. That tribe then has a genetic advantage over other tribes, and thus would be become the dominant gene pool.