《A Secular Trend toward Earlier Male Sexual Maturity》.pdf

A Secular Trend toward Earlier Male Sexual Maturity: Evidence from Shifting Ages of Male Young Adult Mortality Joshua R. Goldstein* Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany Abstract This paper shows new evidence of a steady long-term decline in age of male sexual maturity since at least the mid- eighteenth century. A method for measuring the timing of male maturity is developed based on the age at which male young adult mortality accelerates. The method is applied to mortality data from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the United Kingdom, and Italy. The secular trend toward earlier male sexual maturity parallels the trend toward earlier menarche for females, suggesting that common environmental cues influence the speed of both males’ and females’ sexual maturation. Citation: Goldstein JR (2011) A Secular Trend toward Earlier Male Sexual Maturity: Evidence from Shifting Ages of Male Young Adult Mortality. PLoS ONE 6(8): e14826. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0014826 Editor: Samuli Helle, University of Turku, Finland Received January 22, 2009; Accepted March 11, 2010; Published August 17, 2011 Copyright: 2011 Joshua R. Goldstein et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: Research was supported by a subaward from University of California, Berkeley, Center for Economics and Demography of Aging NIH P30 AG01283. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: goldstein@demogr.mpg.de Introduction sample sizes ma