Humans and babies, a history

Attention, parents – you can now see how you stack up vs. the history of humanity. According to a new peer-reviewed study published last week in Science Advances, researchers at Indiana University have developed a method that can determine the average age humans had children throughout our species’ history.

☝️🧬 First things, first… All children inherit DNA from their parents, which typically contains between 25 and 75 new mutations per offspring. After studying these mutations across thousands of children, the IU researchers noticed something: the kinds of DNA mutations these children received depended on the ages of their mothers and fathers.

Using this insight, the scientists developed a computer model that was used to analyze samples of human DNA dating back to the Stone Age.

📊 The results: The average age that humans became parents throughout the past 250,000 years is 26.9, with fathers averaging 30.7 years of age compared to 23.2 for mothers.

But over the past 5,000 years, the age gap between parents has shrunk. The most recent estimate for average maternal age worldwide is 26.4 years, per the study, while the average age of fathers has remained ~30 years throughout that whole period.

🇺🇸 Zoom in: But let’s forget the distant past for a sec – what about the last few decades? Well just like an elevator to the penthouse, the age of parents has gone up, up, up.

Between 1970 and 2000, the average age of US mothers increased from 24.6 years to 27.2 years, per the latest available CDC data. Meanwhile, the median age of US mothers has increased from 27 to 30 over the past three decades to reach its highest level on record.