A pioneering study of wild chimpanzees has observed that these close human relatives do not routinely experience menopause, rebutting prior studies of captive individuals which had postulated that female chimpanzees reach reproductive senescence at 35 to 40 years of age.Together with recent data from wild gorillas and orangutans, the finding -- described this week in the journal Current Biology -- suggests that human females are rare or even unique among primates in experiencing a lengthy post-reproductive lifespan.
"We find no evidence that menopause is common among wild chimpanzee populations," says lead author Melissa Emery Thompson, a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at Harvard University. "While some female chimpanzees do technically outlive their fertility, it's not at all uncommon for individuals in their 40s and 50s -- quite elderly for wild chimpanzees -- to remain reproductively active".
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