This like most evolutionary psychology seems like one of those “anything goes” explanations that simply seems like a plausible explanation, but can just as easily be offered to explain falsehoods.
The problem with it is that one can invent a scenario that never happened and asked for an explanation and similar such plausible explanations can be proffered for it, but there's really no way to actually verify and test them.
It can just as easily be explained with “It is a simple fluke that will repeat itself in another 70 years.”.
I know of the hypothesis, but it doesn't address the problem that it's an unfalsifiable explanation.
It's observing an event, formulating an explanation for it that sounds plausible enough, but the explanation is unfalsifiable, and a number of other explanations that are just as plausible and unfalsifiable can be proffered.
I think you might be confusing a few different things. I originally wrote "Game theory predicts" because this has been worked out with some rigor in game theory. You should never assume that anything in game theory necessarily applies to real life. At best, game theory models give us a starting point for other lines of inquiry. That's the whole of the claim, not that this is real, but only that there is a game theory model where this works well.
The problem with it is that one can invent a scenario that never happened and asked for an explanation and similar such plausible explanations can be proffered for it, but there's really no way to actually verify and test them.
It can just as easily be explained with “It is a simple fluke that will repeat itself in another 70 years.”.