These days in industrial and post-industrial populations, women can expect to have around
400 menstrual cycles in their lives, give or take a few depending on the number of pregnancies they have and degree of energetic constraint they experience from breastfeeding or exercise (Strassmann 1997). Family planning and contraceptive use increases the number of cycles as well, so we are looking at a biocultural phenomenon. With so many women cycling so often, there is a higher chance of menstrual cycles aligning, or at least appearing to align.
Contrast that with the number of cycles women have in forager populations, which is probably around
50. Forager women tend to have higher energetic constraint from the amount of physical work they need to do to acquire food. This work isn’t necessarily substantial in the sense that they are sprinting all day long, but contrast walking ten miles slowly over the course of one day while carrying food and a kid with an American sitting at a desk, and you can see how the calories burned add up.
Perhaps most important of all, forager women are usually natural fertility, which means overall they aren’t actively limiting their fertility (though again, it’s important to note that they still might try to limit number of offspring). This means that within a few years after their first period they are having their first baby, breastfeeding for many years, then maybe cycling a few times before getting pregnant again. Six to eight pregnancies with four years between each one and you’re almost to menopause! You can see how rare synchrony would be in a population where women are breastfeeding or pregnant through most of their reproductive years.
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