SoS 273: When the Grandmother Hypothesis Speaks w/ Dr. Kristen Hawkes (Part 1)

In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, Chris and Cristina are joined by Dr. Kristen Hawkes, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah and one of the most influential evolutionary anthropologists in the field. Drawing on decades of fieldwork with the Ache of eastern Paraguay and the Hadza of northern Tanzania, her work challenged long-standing assumptions about hunting, showing that men’s hunting often functions less as direct provisioning and more as social signaling. Dr. Hawkes is also the architect of the grandmother hypothesis, a foundational idea in evolutionary anthropology. This framework argues that grandmothers play a critical role in supporting offspring when mothers have new infants, helping to drive key features of human life history, including longer lifespans, slower development, and shorter birth intervals. By integrating ethnographic data, comparative primate evidence, and formal modeling, her research has reshaped our understanding of human longevity, menopause, and social behavior. In this episode, we focus on her paper “Revisiting the Grandmother Hypothesis and Human Longevity,” where she returns to the core logic of grandmothering and its role in explaining why humans live so long compared to other apes. Part 2 (airing next week) zooms out to explore how these dynamics scale up to explain broader features of human life history and social evolution. ------------------------------ Find the work discussed in this episode: Hawkes, K., & Jones, N. B. (2018). Hunter-gatherer studies and human evolution: A very selective review. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 165(4), 777-800. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.23403 Hawkes, K. (2025). Revisiting “Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Longevity,” 2003 AJHB https://doi.Org/10.1002/ajhb.10156. American Journal of Human Biology, 37(4), e70045. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.70045 Hawkes, K. (2025). Life history evolution explains so many features of humanity. In Reference Module in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Psychology (Chapter 27). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-443-27380-3.00027-0 ------------------------------ Contact Dr. Hawkes: hawkes@anthro.utah.edu ------------------------------ Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association: Facebook: facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation/, Website: humbio.org, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc Chris Lynn, Host Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu, E-mail: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly Cristina Gildee, Co-Host & Co-Producer Website: cristinagildee.com, E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu