Grandmother presence improved grandchild survival against childhood infections but not vaccination coverage in historical Finns

Abstract

Grandmother presence can improve the number and survival of their grandchildren, but what grandmothers protect against and how they achieve it remains poorly known. Before modern medical care, infections were leading causes of childhood mortality, alleviated from the nineteenth century onwards by vaccinations, among other things. Here, we combine two individual-based datasets on the genealogy, cause-specific mortality and vaccination status of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Finns to investigate two questions. First, we tested whether there were cause-specific benefits of grandmother presence on grandchild survival from highly lethal infections (smallpox, measles, pulmonary and diarrhoeal infections) and/or accidents. We show that grandmothers decreased all-cause mortality, an effect which was mediated through smallpox, pulmonary and diarrhoeal infections, but not via measles or accidents. Second, since grandmothers have been suggested to increase vaccination coverage, we tested whether the grandmother effect on smallpox survival was mediated through increased or earlier vaccination, but we found no evidence for such effects. Our findings that the beneficial effects of grandmothers are in part driven by increased survival from some (but not all) childhood infections, and are not mediated via vaccination, have implications for public health, societal development and human life-history evolution.