Hazda women are supercool with menopause

Maybe we just need to forage all day then?

British biological anthropologist Dr Katherine Fitzpatrick spent several years  studying the menstrual life cycles of the Hadza women for her doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge.

The Hazda live near Lake Eyasi in northern Tanzania and represent one of the world’s last remaining hunter-gatherer populations.

Dr Fitzpatrick spent more than 1,300 hours watching women across 10 camps between 2004 and 2006, and learned a lot about their menopause experience in the process. I came across her work while prepping a recent presentation, and found it so fascinating.

Here are some highlights:

1. They don’t even have a name for menopause – they just call it “no more bleeding”.

2. They are killing it on the job: “Post-menopausal women eat less relative to what they forage, rest less and forage more kilocalories overall compared to pre-menopausal women.”

3. The data was supportive of the Grandmother Hypothesis, which is the evolutionary theory that menopause evolved because women are more valuable to…