Rebecca Sear, an evolutionary demographer and anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who was not involved in the study, cautioned that it “cannot definitively answer the question of why menopause evolved”.
Whales are incredibly difficult to study, he commented in Nature, and most of the data used for research was from unnatural events such as mass strandings.
Meanwhile, there is growing criticism that little research has been done on menopause in human women due to a long-standing male-skewed bias in medical research.
“Human grandmothers, like whale grandmothers, are important in the lives of their adult children and grandchildren, but older women are often overlooked in policy circles and public health research,” Sear said.
