Images from preindustrial Finish church records (Virpi Lummaa)
21 July 2010 - Marriage patterns drive fertility decline. Researchers at the University of Sheffield have applied an evolutionary `use it or lose it´ principle when studying past marriage patterns, to show that marriage can influence the evolution of age-patterns of fertility. Researchers Duncan Gillespie, Dr Virpi Lummaa and Dr Andrew Russell, from the University´s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, studied Finnish church records from the 18th and 19th centuries, a time during which almost everyone married and divorce was forbidden, to trace the survival and marriage histories of 1,591 women. They found that women aged 30-35 were the most likely to be married. Those that married wealthy husbands were married at a younger age but to relatively older men, thereby gaining the family size-benefits of wealth but also an increased risk of widowhood. This high chance of widowhood, coupled with low re-marriage prospects for older widows with children, limited the percentage of women in the population with the opportunity to reproduce at older ages. In today´s society however, women do not start childbearing until an older age as marriage is often delayed, and casual or short-term relationships and divorce are more common.
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