Human longevity at the cost of reproductive success : evidence from global data

A trade-off between reproduction and somatic maintenance and hence survival is fundamental to life-history theory. We investigated the relationship between female fecundity and longevity in #Homo sapiens$ using data from 153 countries located all over the world. The raw correlation betwen life span and fecundity was highly significant with a negative trend. After longevity and fecundity estimates were controlled for by confounding factors such as historical (i.e. human ethnic groups), religious, geographical, socio-economical and parasitological components, we still observed a negative relationship between the mean female fecundity and the mean longevity in a country. These findings support the hypothesis for the existence of a trade-off between these two key life-history traits in humans, as also reported by a recent single longitudinal study in England. (Résumé d'auteur