A new study looks at average age of parents over past 250K years

Question

A study recently released by Indiana University looking at types of DNA mutations found that "the average age that humans had children throughout the past 250,000 years is 26.9. Furthermore, fathers were consistently older, at 30.7 years on average, than mothers, at 23.2 years on average, but the age gap has shrunk in the past 5,000 years, with the study’s most recent estimates of maternal age averaging 26.4 years. The shrinking gap seems to largely be due to mothers having children at older ages."

There is a chart available at the website showing how this changed over time, but the time dimension is measured in generations (on a logarithmic scale), so it's not real easy to translate into years.

Comments

Using WikiTree's "Ancestor Statistics", it shows me that over the past 10 generations in my family tree, the average generation length is 32 years, and the average lifespan is 72 years.

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Where do you find that statistic?

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Try: https://apps.wikitree.com/apps/nelson3486/stats/

Answer 1

Thanks Bob, this is useful for those folks who we know are parents or children, but have no recorded dates. We can use this as our default for estimation and consider it close.

Comments

I had been estimating 30 years, when I had the child's age/birth but not the parents birth. That's going to be reasonably close with the mother, but there are exceptions on the father's side. When I do estimate it, I always mark it uncertain and state the reason in the bio section. I figure a ballpark number is better than no number at all (when there's no other dates to attach to a profile).

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agreed, with both your statement and your method of logging the decision, and it helps with searches and duplicate checking to have an estimated date.