Menopause
The menopause transition typically begins between 40 and 50 years of age (average 47.5). The duration of perimenopause may be for up to eight years. Women will often, but not always, start these transitions (perimenopause and menopause) about the same time as their mother did.
Menopause
While it is fairly common for extant hunter-gatherers to live past age 50 provided that they survive childhood, fossil evidence shows that mortality in adults have decreased over the last 30000 to 50000 years (possibly due to innovations relating to defense from large carnivores and/or decrease in the ratio of large carnivores to humans) and that it was extremely unusual for early Homo sapiens to live to age 50. This discovery have led some biologists to argue that there was no selection for or against menopause at the time at which the ancestor of all modern humans lived in Africa and had not split into different ethnicities, suggesting that menopause is instead a random evolutionary effect of a selection shadow regarding ageing in early Homo sapiens. It is also argued that since the population fraction of post-menopausal women in early Homo sapiens was so low, menopause had no evolutionary effect on mate selection or social behaviors related to mate selection.