Human generation times across the past 250,000 years

Abstract

The generation times of our recent ancestors can tell us about both the biology and social organization of prehistoric humans, placing human evolution on an absolute timescale. We present a method for predicting historic male and female generation times based on changes in the mutation spectrum. Our analyses of whole-genome data reveal an average generation time of 26.9 years across the past 250,000 years, with fathers consistently older (30.7 years) than mothers (23.2 years). Shifts in sex-averaged generation times have been driven primarily by changes to the age of paternity rather than maternity, though we report a disproportionate increase in female generation times over the past several thousand years. We also find a large difference in generation times among populations, with samples from current African populations showing longer ancestral generation times than non-Africans for over a hundred thousand years, reaching back to a time when all humans occupied Africa.