Vulnerable yet vital: Why childhood and old age are key to our human capacities

Undoing the clickbait:

Childhood:

> Childhood seems to be designed to enhance learning – so extending that period would be a good strategy for a species that needs to learn more.

Old age:

>For humans, the elders at the other end of the lifespan appear to be a particularly important source of care, and might have played a crucial role in human evolution. The anthropologist Kristen Hawkes has called this ‘the grandmother hypothesis’, and has shown that, in forager cultures, post-menopausal grandmothers are a crucial resource, especially for toddlers.

To be fair with aeon, the original subtitle was:

> The dance of love and lore between grandparent and grandchild is at the centre, not the fringes, of our evolutionary story

Did you read the article? It says nothing of the sort. “Old people are evolutionarily valuable” doesn’t mean that dying of old age is good; if anything, an affirmation of the value of old people helps support the idea that dying of old age is bad.

Also: the important part of “old” in this article is “people who have lived for a long time”, not “people who have aged and are close to death”.