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DanArmak comments on Does evolution select for mortality? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Most animals are fertile throughout their lives, although fertility often declines with age, like most functions.
Humans have the (female) menopause, and it is unclear what the evolutionary reason for it may be, but for most animals this is irrelevant.
Interesting.
From the last sentence of that article, it might be the case that captivity/domestication would increase total lifespan (unsurprising, given better nutrition and healthcare), but not reproductive lifespan, which in the wild are usually about the same.
I seemed to recall that human females are born with a finite number of ova which aren't replenished in adults and menopause was simply due to them running out of ova (which would explain why there was a maximum reproductive age, which if it was longer than typical lifespans in the EEA wouldn't be subject to any evolutionary pressures and so it would be stuck to an arbitrary value until modern times), but apparently it isn't uncontroversial that that is the case and anyway the numbers don't seem anywhere near small enough for that to be possibly an issue. Huh.