Menopause
Menopause typically occurs between 49 and 52 years of age. The majority of women have their last period between the ages of 48 and 55. The average age of the last period in the United States is 51 years, in the United Kingdom is 52 years, in Ireland is 50 years and in Australia is 51 years. In India and the Philippines, the median age of natural menopause is considerably earlier, at 44 years. The menopausal transition or perimenopause leading up to menopause usually lasts 7 years (sometimes as long as 14 years).
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.