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But they've already done that, so it seems late to optimize for having reproductively successful ancestors

• DVassallo 8y ago
  People with living parents and grandparents would have likely had a better chance of survival than those without living family members. Thus, those with genes that have adapted to live longer and healthier would still have had an evolutionary benefit, despite no reproductive benefits. It might be true even today, let alone in the caveman era.
  • checkyoursudo 8y ago
    While I personally think your idea is likely, you really only need people to live to be about 50 or 60 to accomplish this, I think. If every generation has kids from around 15-20 years old, which seems very likely in our distant past, then you only need to be about 60 to have three generations of descendants (children, grand-children, great-grand-children), in which case by this argument perhaps you've done enough already and are free to die by whatever means you prefer after that point. Maybe our advantage was that we, unlike other primates, had a lot of individuals even only making it to 40 years old in the distant past before they got eaten by tigers or succumbed to all manner of mosquito-borne diseases et cetera.
    • DVassallo 8y ago
      It's not the earliest age of reproduction that matters, but the latest age. If a woman can give birth at age 40, and descendants with living parents and grand-parents have a significant survival advantage, then it makes sense that we've adapted to live to over 80.