Or it's as simple as the fact that modern society treats people as children well into their 20s. Would I take a 15 year old american high school girl/boy as a mother/father? No.

Would I take a 15 year old girl in a tribal village as mother? Sure, why not?

What you're not considering is that the tribal mother is almost certainly not raising the child in a nuclear family.

The "nuclear family" is a modern construct. That's the point.

What's more strange, having grandparents raise children or importing young women from across the planet and paying them to do it while the parents sit inside offices all day shuffling paper around...

Probably has a few grandparents around...

The reason I'm skeptical is because this article assumes our social constructs have meaning.

It also assumes that these constructs are the more favorable outcome in increasing mankind's "fitness", than a mutation that gives women more than 400 eggs.

It explains this away by saying evolution perfectly timed menstruation to allow for raising the last child to adulthood coinciding with your average-est old age of 70. It must be further hypothesized and explained how natural selection could have codified this time traveling foresight into the genome, before even beginning to leap to that conclusion, while simultaneously acknowledging other mammals don't have this "feature", while simultaneously acknowledging that kidneys don't just give out at age 45 in a kidney menopause process, or lungs, or other organs. The article inadvertently makes the greatest case that the reproductive system breaking itself is a flaw, and tries to extrapolate why that would it is a feature, and why it is the best possible feature, when a best possible feature according to their time traveling genome theory, would be an adaptive amount of eggs in each woman based on their genetic fitness, instead of 400.

There is actually a bit of (wonky) evidence that humans and mice carry stem cells in their ovaries to indefinitely produce eggs.

See for example: http://www.nature.com/news/reproductive-biology-fertile-mind...

> in 2009, Ji Wu at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and her colleagues reported that they had isolated from mice what she called “female germline stem cells” — not from bone marrow, but from ovarian tissue. When her team transplanted the cells into chemotherapy-treated female mice, they developed into mature oocytes, then fertilizable eggs and, the clincher, healthy pups.

>[Tilly] has since published a parade of headline-grabbing papers, culminating this year in a report2 that he had isolated the elusive stem cells from human ovaries and coaxed them to develop into bona fide oocytes. But his work has been dogged by doubt.

It's still really messy and I haven't heard anything new in 3 years, but humans may have the capability in place to create unlimited oocytes like sperm, it's just hard to tell why we don't (the OP's story is one story - there are unlimited possible stories, including simply random loss).

Thanks for that link - the subject has been on my mind for a while.

> It's still really messy and I haven't heard anything new in 3 years

There is some very good-but-old research into reproductive physiology. There is quite a gap between modern "medical science" and physiology. The core problem is that it is much more profitable for Wall Street to suppress women's difficult menstrual cycles with drugs, than to implement what was figured out long ago.

> but humans may have the capability in place to create unlimited oocytes like sperm, it's just hard to tell why we don't

Women's reproductive organs get worn out by Estrogen, which should be known as "The Cancer Hormone" or "The Heart Attack Hormone". Fundamentally, estrogen tells tissues to "swell and divide". Estrogen is balanced by Progesterone, which is Nature's anti-estrogen.

Before she met me, my girlfriend self-medicated her depression with the street pharmacy, and shut down her menstrual cycle. Some very stupid endocrinologists told her she "went through menopause", at around 28 years old. Now she thinks she can't get pregnant, because MENOPAUSE. But if her pituitary starts working right, and a proper diet and the right supplements refresh her uterus, she could release an egg at any time. She's not going to get knocked up, because I've just verified that my reversible sperm-elimination strategy has been successful, but I've met plenty of women with an infant on their hip whose doctors told them they were infertile.

> because I've just verified that my reversible sperm-elimination strategy has been successful

what? and how did you verify?

I've used my own variant of the heat method: http://www.newmalecontraception.org/heat-methods/

I verified with a microscope - the amscope 150 (iirc) was not quite $100 with some slides. I should have bought the microscope first.

> Human females (and males) are reproductively capable at 15 and yet who would consider them mature and capable parents at that age?

Evolution would.

Consider that modern life is very different from the vast majority of evolutionary history that framed how we developed. In a modern, affluent society, a 50 year old woman would have little problem successfully raising a newborn. On the African Savanah, would that same 50 year old woman do just as well? Or would she on average find that she could not raise her children as well as the 20 year old mothers? I'm guessing the latter.

Life was not as easy and it was likely much shorter on average. In a more primitive society, if a newborn's mother dies, that newborn probably has very low survival odds. Older women could definitely still have played an important role in raising children in the context of the family/tribe, but I see clear evolutionary advantages to having your children while younger, because you are simply more likely to be alive to raise them.

> it was likely much shorter on average

The average includes a huge number of deaths of children and of mothers though - not counting those risks (childhood, especially the very early one, and giving birth) it's higher than most people think. In a lecture on microbes (http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/return-of-the-m...) the professor mentions as an aside that a late Victorian British citizen after excluding those risks actually had a slightly longer life-expectancy than a modern British citizen! While that is fairly recent it still is long before modern medicine and antibiotics.

Quote:

> And what is interesting, if you take out the childhood mortality, the Victorian person between 1850 and 1880 lived slightly longer, if he was a male, than you do today.

("if he was male": giving birth was very risky)

So it seems that good food (variety plus enough of it) and hygiene did most of the job of extending life-expectancy outside the above two risks - and modern medicine very significantly lowered childhood and birth (mother) deaths. In the light of such evidence modern medicine does not seem to have had a great effect on life expectancy once you made it past childhood. We can't do anything against "aging".

I am talking about 2 million years ago, not 2 hundred.

Yeah, life was not that easy for these people in some sense. (I'd argue it was easier in others - no debt, no stress, no health problems stemming from sedentary lifestyles.) A 20 year old woman was much more capable of hunting than a 50 year old. Therefore, the 50 year olds were probably left back at camp with the children while the younger women and men went hunting.

There is plenty anthropological research on the social structures of these hunter-gatherer humans and children were usually collectively raised by the whole group rather than in their biological families.

Technically speaking females are fertile before that. Then, humans are much more fragile compared to other species after birth and require extra care. This is because as the head volume increased, they had to be born ahead of time otherwise they couldn't make it through the "birth canal".

Now, anatomically modern humans do not differ much from humans over 10,000 years ago. Parenting back then was basically bring food and keep predators away, not studying and getting higher education and getting a job to provide to your family. Modern lifestyle doesn't have to do much with what is good biologically: oocyte quality peaks on early 20s and decreases with age.

How long doesn't parenting last? 15~20 years? When is the emotional maturity required? When the child is a teenager, not as a baby.