Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding

by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution.

"Mothers and Others" finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends--and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Sarah Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. Mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not.

From its opening vision of "apes on a plane"; to descriptions of baby care among marmosets, chimpanzees, wolves, and lions; to explanations about why men in hunter-gatherer societies hunt together, "Mothers and Others" is compellingly readable. But it is also an intricately knit argument that ever since the Pleistocene, it has taken a village to raise children--and how that gave our ancient ancestors the first push on the path toward becoming emotionally modern human beings.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Anthropology, Psychology, Parenting, Evolution, Feminism

432 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2009

About the author

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is an American anthropologist and primatologist who has made several major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. She has been selected as one of the 21 “Leaders in Animal Behavior.”

Reviews

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Materialist) Anthropology 102: Female “Human Nature”?

Preamble:
--For the 101 foundations on “human nature”, I’ve unpacked them in reviewing Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.
…Now, we can build further, with Hrdy’s lens focusing on female nurturing in human evolution. Boehm’s book mostly focuses on the evolution of hunter-gatherers (esp. 100,000 years ago to present), whereas Hrdy focuses earlier on the “pre-adaptions” (“perhaps as long as two million years ago”).

Highlights:

1) Darwinian In-Group Competition:
--As discussed in reviewing Boehm, pre-dominantly male scholars on evolution have focused on “survival of the fittest” in terms of competitive male dominance, from the individual level to socializing for hunting/warfare.
--A key challenge is why great apes, who are more hierarchically despotic/competitive than humans (hunter-gatherers), did not evolve such social behavioral tools. Boehm then connects the social aspects (ex. big game hunting’s cooperation and food sharing) to hunter-gatherers developing egalitarian politics.

2) Pre-Conditions: Matriarchy’s Social Nest:
--Hrdy considers the evolutionary pre-conditions that equipped hunter-gatherers with the potential for egalitarian politics:
i) “Theory of Mind”:
--Despite the vulgarization of Adam Smith’s quote on the social benefits of self-seeking individuals, Smith (a moral philosopher who wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments before his Wealth of Nations) still recognized the social importance of human’s interest in the fortunes of others.
--In psychology, “theory of mind”/“intersubjectivity” is a useful lens to distinguish humans from great apes, where humans are hyper social in their development of mind reading (i.e. attribute mental states to others), empathy (interest in others thinking), and care that others reciprocate this interest back (mutual understanding, not just actions but also beliefs).
…While behaviors like imitating adult faces are shared by baby chimps, their development quickly stalls while human babies expand their skills in mind-reading/empathy/mutual understanding. I’m particularly leery (pun intended) of anatomical evolutionary theory, but this hint is illustrative: human eyes are distinct from apes in how much information they share (esp. the whites of our eyes revealing direction, etc.) whereas apes can mask such information.
ii) “Cooperative Breeding”:
--In the late 1960’s, behaviorist theory (ex. babies crying is a perverse learned behavior, so parents should not attend to their babies when crying, or else they will be conditioned to keep using this behavior) was challenged by “attachment theory” (ex. babies crying is a natural preprogramed adaptation); however, this still framed an all-nurturing mother.
--Human infants have a distinctly long maturation period which requires extended care to feed/nurture such large brains. Unlike other great apes where the mothers are hyper possessive, human child-raising have historically featured alloparenting (shared care beyond parents).
--Thus, instead of reducing human social survival to (i) father hunter/fighter, (ii) mother baby-factory/sole care-giver, (iii) offspring genes, Hrdy considers the “cooperative breeding”/“inclusive fitness” of the group (what others call “social nest”), especially other female support. Humans feature females who have long lives post-reproduction/menopause (rare in other species), so Hrdy is particularly interested in grandmothers passing on their nurturing experiences.
…Some diversity in care-giving brings benefits for nurturing the social skills described earlier (mind-reading/empathy/cooperation). Younger care-givers get to practice their nurturing skills. Babies also evolve to become sensory traps to attract indiscriminate care.
iii) Matriarchal Support:
--The anthropology of hunter-gatherers suggest certain matriarchal social arrangements to support this “social nest”. Matrilocal residence where the couple lives with/near the female’s family provides more familiar female support (kin support, including grandmother as alloparents) for the mother (and also more political bargaining power).
--Matrilineal kinship, ex. first born returning to mother’s family, also relates to matriarchal kin support/bargaining power. What about fathers/men? Well, anthropological research suggests a wide range of care-taking here, from none to parent/alloparent.

3) Modern Pathologies: Patriarchy’s Nuclear Family:
--The above hunter-gatherer “social nest” spanned much of human evolutionary history (“perhaps as long as two million years ago” to around 12,000-10,000 years ago); the implication here is this has had deep effects on our “human nature” (Hrdy: need for “social nest” in healthy child development; Boehm: desire for egalitarian politics where collective action preserves individual autonomy by preventing despotic rule). Since we never hear this story, we never consider this as “normal”/“human nature”.
--Instead, our “normal” myth starts with the recent domestication of animals and agriculture leading to settlements/stored surpluses/property rights. The resulting need to protect property rights and the hierarchies that emerged pushed male in-groups into dominance via patrilineal inheritance (esp. new property rights) and patrilocal residency (male kinship for warfare), eroding female bargaining power: female mobility became increasingly restricted (chastity/property) and female kinship attacked (ex. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation).
--Settled life brought shorter birth intervals and earlier reproduction, despite lack of emotional skills and loss of the “social nest” (female kinship social support). All this may have led to more “fitness” for surviving patriarchy, but at the cost of child social/emotional development.
--Indeed, today’s “normal” of “nuclear family” (mother/father/children living in single-family home) is a further erosion of the “social nest” since only the past century (“at most to Victorian times”). In the US, it was not until the post-WWII 1950’s, when baby-boomers shifted to single-family homes (to absorb all the cars/appliances as US factories shifted from war-time production, with fears of slipping back into another capitalist Depression).
--This is connected with modernity's childhood neglect/abuse, leading to “disorganized attachment” (confusion/fear of primary care-givers). There's so much we can add here. Think of all the additional care-giving demands placed solely on the mother/father. This atomization severs kinship support (esp. female), with grandparents atomized in retirement homes. Are divorce/single-parenting/addiction/mental health crisis/cycle of neglect and abuse surprising given social disconnections/added pressures?
-The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
-Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions
...The scariest conclusion is that, since “human nature” is dynamic from an evolutionary lens, if we are using our evolutionary social skills (social nest nurturing, egalitarian politics) less and less, then we may be weeding them out of “human nature”...

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Excellent article discussing this book's major theme was printed in the New York Times on 3 March 2009.)

Less than halfway through, but this is a good book and I've got to start getting my notes into coherent form.

• Hrdy is an academic (over 100 pages of this book is allocated to endnotes and bibliography), but her writing style is very accessible given the subject.

• Key proposition: "the crucial different between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions" (p. 9).

• Two revelations, one quite startling. First, the way we got to the above is via collaborative caregiving to children.

• Second: children — even neonatal — are subject to evolutionary pressures just as adults are. Becoming cute is fundamentally adaptive: a child that becomes attractive to caregivers increases the likelihood that it will survive compared to its non-cute competitors. Evolution has provided infants and children with instinctive abilities and subconscious strategies intended to co-opt others into providing care.

• Primate contrast: the other Great Apes besides humans exhibit obsessive and jealous maternal care. If a gorilla or orangutan infant in the wild is ever not in its mother's embrace, it is almost certainly because the mother is dead. Mothers not only don't permit others to assist in caregiving, they literally aren't out of contact with the infant for the first four or six months of the infant's life (p. 68ff).

• More like humans are the callitrichids, which as New World monkeys, aren't even all that closely related to humans. But they: (1) breed fast, like humans (other Great Apes breed much slower than we do), (2) enlist many others in caregiving, (3) adapt quickly to new environments and thus spread quickly (p. 94ff).

• Disconcerting quote: "Children do best in societies where childrearing is considered too important to be left entirely to parents" (p. 103). A corollary of the "It Takes a Village" hypothesis, heavily backed by empirical evidence.

• Disconcerting research: A child's nutritional status is best predicted by the security of a child's attachment to his mother, however that attachment shows no significant association to the child's socio-emotional development. "The strongest predictor of empathy, dominance, independence, and achievement orientation often turned out to be a strong attachment to a non-parental caregiver" (p. 131).


Basic theory: humans differentiated from other Great Apes when they adopted the novel (compared to the other Great Apes) strategy for cooperative caregiving of the young. By enlisting others in care (especially pre- and post-fertile females), a mother is free to acquire calories and accelerate the next breeding cycle.

» This isn't novel across all species, just within Great Apes. Plenty of other species have collaborative care.

» However, Great Apes had already evolved social tribes, for collaboration in defense. Most social animals rely on biochemical cues; Great Apes had developed large-ish brains instead, using them to track relationships and hierarchy.

» Large brains already using social cognition, when paired with collaborative caregiving, put evolutionary pressure on children to develop social strategies to enhance survival odds: become attractive to alloparents or die.

» Babies instinctively scan adult faces for cues to emotional states to gauge intention, and thus which might become caregivers and what strategy to use to manipulate those adults. For example, an infant must choose whether to cry or coo, to babble and giggle or be coy (p. 139). Proto-human infants are subject to cognitive challenges that will have evolutionary survival significance.

» Babbling, for example, may be a strategy to capture the attention of adults long enough to co-opt them. Note that infants babble at strangers more often than mothers. Babbling doesn't occur in continuous-care-and-contact species such as chimpanzees, but does among a few other collaborative caregivers, such as marmosets (callitrichids). Hrdy believes babbling arose long before speech. (P. 122ff.)

» Evolutionary pressures developed social skills in infants and children, and increase the social abilities of the adult brain as well, thus giving rise to more and more complex societies.

» Other Great Apes juveniles play, just as humans do. But those other apes will have spent their infancy with their mothers in continuous-care-and-contact, where interacting with others is not a critical part of survival. Proto-humans, in contrast, will already be relative masters at empathy and engagement (p. 138).


• Role of father. The most significant aspect of paternal care seems to be the provision of meat. In many primitive cultures it is not provided reliably, but can still be a major source of annual calories. But in some cultures meat is major: the Ache derive 87% of their annual calories from game (p. 152).

• When assistance in provisioning for children looks sketchy, women (or both parents) would add an extra "father" to the family. Among the Ache, children with two "fathers" were better fed and on average more likely to survive (p. 155).

• In traditional China, a nominally patriarchal society, extra men might be added to provide additional wages (p. 153). (Perhaps we'll see this again to deal with the surplus of males in China.)

• "When they find themselves 'hungry for meat', Kulina women order men to go hunting. On their return, each woman selects a hunter other than her own husband as a partner. 'At the end of the day the men return in a group to the village, where the adult women form a large semicircle and sing erotically provocative songs ... asking for their "meat"' (p. 156ff). (Didn't Michener use something like this in his Hawaii?)

• Stepchildren are notoriously vulnerable. However, "one stepchild ... who fared unusually well was also a nephew, the child of a deceased brother whose mother the hunter had married" (p. 158). (Doesn't the Old Testament command something like this? Hmmm, no: Deuteronomy 25:5-10 only applies to brothers without issue. Strange.)

Children are addictive. Keeping children fed is so crucial that parental brains are heavily conditioned.

» Example one. Animals respond instinctively to stimuli that might sometimes be triggered inappropriately. Here a Northern Cardinal is feeding a goldfish, whose gaping mouth apparently was similar enough to a chick's (p. 201).


» You know that rats will chose cocaine over food, right? They'll starve themselves to death to feed their addition. So which wins: cocaine or infants? No contest: the mother rat will forgo the cocaine for pups (p. 213).

» Babies encourage kidnapping. Immature female lemurs will hunger for experience with babies so much that if none are available in their troop, they'll risk kidnapping one from a neighboring troop (p. 219).

» Babies do this on purpose. Even at the risk of higher predation, babies evolve signs that indicate "Baby on board": coloration that is very highly visible, for example. Or, for humans, extra plumpness that indicates they are healthy and full-term and thus worth keeping (p. 223ff).

» Humans have more resistance — this comes with cooperative breeding. If a new mother doesn't perceive adequate social resources, she is more likely to abandon the baby or suffer post-partum depression. Both humans and other socially breeding primates are more provisional regarding care; continuous-care-and-contact primate mothers are obsessive and not provisional at all.

• "Among foragers, any girl sufficiently well-fed to ovulate in her early teens was, almost by definition, a girl surrounded by supportive kin, people who after she gave birth were likely to be willing to help her rear her young. After the Pleistocene, and increasingly over the ensuing centuries, even young women still psychologically immature and woefully lacking in sympathy or social support could nevertheless be well-fed enough to ovulate and conceive while still in their early teens." (p. 287)

• "Perverse as it sounds ... it appears that children today have begun to survive too well. ... Back in the Pleistocene, any child who was fortunate enough to grow up acquired a sense of emotional security by default. Those without committed mothers and also lacking allomothers responsive to their needs would rarely have survived long enough for the emotional sequelae of neglect to matter. Today, this is no longer true..." (p. 290).

• Alarmist conclusion: "If empathy and understanding develop only under particular rearing circumstances, and if an ever-increasing proportion of the species fails to encounter those conditions but nevertheless survives to to reproduce, it won't matter how valuable the underpinnings for collaborations were in the past. Compassion and the quest for emotional connection will fade away as surely as sight in cave-dwelling fish" (p. 293). Probably wrong. Even if the circumstances that gave rise to these attributes in evolutionary history were to disappear, the traits themselves are strongly adaptive (recall the monkeys-on-a-plane story the book opened with), and the fact that the attributes can be expressed means evolution is more likely to select for their continued presence by other means than for their absences.

Back to central thesis: Before evolutionary divergence, we shared with other great apes advanced cognitive capacities, Machiavellian intelligence, and an incipient "theory of mind". What triggered our development into more advanced humans was the shift to cooperative breeding, which isn't actually very rare, even among primates (just not among apes). Larger brains, language, etc., arose from that convergence (p. 280).

(Selected for the Cognitive Science Reading & Discussion Group in October 2009.)
 

[Andrés Astudillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind-blowing.
This is my first evolutionary psychology book written by a woman. And it actually confirms what evolutionary psychology states about women: they are able to understand and be more empathetic to every living being. So, while male minds focus on sexual relations, abuse, war and violence, we have a book that focuses on cooperation. Fascinating.

The book is not biased. I had the chance to read "Sex at dawn" by Christopher Ryan, and I couldn't help to notice what a bunch of crap was written, while tearing down evolutionary psychologyst's arguments on many fields. This book covers evolutionary psychology, and even mentions patriarchy, but not in the -progressive context-, but in terms of understanding male mind and the dawn of civilization. Patriarchy is not something we, males wanted to write down in order to fuck up any opportunity for women to success. Every part and every chapter of our civilization is both an evolutionary biological novelty, thus, changing and molding behavioral patterns.

She explains that there were times in which small societies on the Pleistocene used to be matrilineal. Women are the ones who create humans beings, and resources needed to be where the females or mothers-to-be were. When we discovered agriculture, things changed. We started to stock up on resources and changing the patterns in which society was built; this is where we (males) in Richard Wrangham words, started cohesions based on "coalitionary proactive aggression" and bam, we started a patrilocal and patrilineal distribution of resources. To sum up, De Beauvoir's and Foucault thesis about power, are debunked because we can now explain patriarchy in terms of male vestigial psychology and we now know that not everything in human behavior is about "power", as Foucault explained.

The book is about cooperation, and breeding patterns. It is mentioned that not everything is about the nuclear family (mom, dad and children); that kind of family is the product of a novelty, human civilization. However, using ethnographic studies, we now know that alloparenting is as natural as having thirst in primates, including us. The book does not say that other studies about evolutionary psychology are wrong, it just states that human (both male and female) are a mixture of many points of view and that everything we are going to study, must be read through evolutionary lens.

[Inder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy explodes, with methodical logic and impeccable research, our culture's ideas about the essence of human nature, the family, motherhood, and gender. As with Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species , it would not be an exaggeration to say that this book fundamentally changed the way I think about motherhood.

Bam! Pow! Smash!

Seriously. That's how it felt.

In Mothers and Others, Hrdy takes on topics as broad as the essentially cooperative nature of humans, the nuclear family, and how "it takes a village." Conclusion (brutally paraphrased): If you think you weren't meant to be a stay at home mom, well, that's because no one was "meant" to be a sole caretaker of children. Human children demand more than even two parents can provide for them. Which is why humans have historically raised children cooperatively. Which is, to really boil it down, a primary reason that humans are so good at reading each others' intentions, feelings, and thoughts - skills that are very useful for cooperative breeding.

Here, she also explodes the basis of attachment theory, by pointing out that hunter-gatherer human mothers, unlike the other great apes, do not remain in contact with their infants 24/7, but tend to be very trusting about passing them off to kin and friends ("as-kin," in her terms). While this may seem like a statement of the obvious, it radically challenges the whole basis of "attachment parenting." Hrdy does not question that infants form strong attachments with their mothers or that human infants prefer to be in contact with a person at all times; what she suggests is that infants also form strong attachments to a variety of others - "alloparents" - in a system of cooperative breeding that actually makes humans more similar to cooperatively breeding birds than chimps or gorillas. She suggests that having children cared for by non-parents (cough cough, day care providers?) is not only acceptable, but - watch out world! - natural. Potent stuff!

But this summary doesn't do the book justice. There is so much more.

One of the best things about Hrdy is her friendly, easy-going writing style. I know other commenters have remarked that this is "dense" and "heavy" but I find Hrdy's writing to be meaty but riveting.

Warning: Prepare to have your deepest assumptions challenged in ways that are not always comfortable (although the topics here are thankfully not quite as difficult and disturbing as those discussed in Mother Nature). Highly recommended.

[Rossdavidh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Motherhood as we know it is one of the biggest differences between mammals and birds, on the one hand, and fish, insects, crustaceans, etc. on the other. Most animal species just lay their eggs (perhaps covering them in sand or dirt), and depart; they have fathers and mothers, but not dads and moms. Only among birds and mammals do most species have at least one adult stick around to rear the child up to adulthood, and even among mammals, for most species it is only the mother.

In fact, for our closest related species, it is only the mother. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers rarely allow anyone else access to their infants, not even siblings or the father, who are genetically just as connected to the infant as they are. For their part, chimpanzees and gorillas other than the mother are often tolerant of the very young, but they do not typically take an active role in feeding or teaching them.

So much is well known, amply demonstrated by field work and observation in zoos, and uncontroversial. But, Sarah Hrdy goes a bit further, into territory that may not be exactly controversial, but is certainly not supported by the same broad consensus. Unlike, say, some of the more zealous advocates of attachment parenting, she does not believe that early human mothers held their infants at all times. In fact, she believes that it was a fundamental step in our becoming human, that we do not allow the care of the very young to be the province of their mothers only. Fathers, siblings, the mother's siblings, grandfathers, and especially grandmothers are, she believes, important in how infant humans are raised in nearly every human society, and in particular in the process whereby we stopped being "ancestors of humans" and became instead "humans".

Hrdy has compiled a great deal of information about many other primate species, besides the well studied chimpanzees and gorillas. Unusually for mammals (although not unusually for birds), many monkey species have fathers that take an active role in the support and rearing of the young. Hrdy looks at a broad range of primate species, across many criteria (how food is gathered and shared, mating habits, territory, etc. etc.), and comes to the conclusion that our early human ancestors were more likely to have had non-maternal caregivers, much like many modern hunter-gatherer societies that have been studied, and unlike chimpanzees. Her range of knowledge is impressive, although of course it is difficult for me to evaluate this critically since I am not an expert in the field. She provides a lot of evidence and data from her own observations of many different primate species, and also from many other researchers. It sounds convincing to me.

But, given my (lack of) background, I don't suppose there was much chance of me being unconvinced, and anyway nobody has an particular reason to care about my opinion on the topic, so deciding your opinion on a question in regard to Pleistocene proto-human parenting styles is not a reason to read this book. What is an excellent reason, though, is that it is a thorough (and also thoroughly enjoyable) examination of the question of what the consequences are for our society, of how we allocate raising children. It cannot be coincidental that, as the work of caring for children has fallen more and more on parents and specialists, and less on that child's broader society, we as a society have become more and more disconnected and atomized. Hrdy avoids drawing any conclusions about how modern child-rearing is or should be done, and that is probably just as well, as the topic unleashes volcanic emotions for many. But looking across many different species' strategies for this, and thinking about how it might have shaped (and might continue to shape) how we relate to each other, is time well spent. Bravo to Hrdy for encouraging us to do so.

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a difficult one to review. On the one hand, it is a thorough and well researched anthology of anthropology and primatology that shows how human children (and some nonhuman) came to rely on the care of many actors, not just the immediate family or (as is popularly believed in anthropology) the mother. Hrdy writes well and accessibly, and questions accepted norms about child-rearing, particularly taking aim at this in the fifth chapter which finally confronts American bias toward a nuclear family (where the author is based).

On the other hand, the book makes some extraordinarily prejudiced assumptions that are themselves loaded with Western bias. There are repeated references to contemporary hunter-gatherer societies as if they represent past societies. Although Hrdy admires many of their traits, and she explores different systems of parenting and alloparenting, it is highly problematic that these societies are positioned as they are: At one stage she refers to modern African societies as "both post- and pre-colonial"; of course, all contemporary society is postcolonial. In some paragraphs there is a leap of logic directly from "primate" to "African" (with an inference that the next step is "something else") that is careless, although I suspect it is never malicious as Hrdy writes with care about her subjects.

I am not an anthropologist and accept that this type of thinking is more common in that field, but still found these moments of embedded bias highly jarring while reading, spoiling some very good ideas that themselves are rightly questioning bias. By the ninth and final chapter, Hrdy presents her convincing arguments of mutual care well. Mothers and Others has some brilliant ideas and great information, despite its persistent problems. But it should certainly be read with this cachet in mind.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hrdy is a significant voice of sanity in the anthropological/primatological end of the "what is it to be human" science world. Blaffer's books tend to get less attention than Nicholas Wade's (or even Franz de Waal's and Jared Diamond's*) despite her well-supported focus (or perhaps because of) - cooperation as a distinguisher of humanity. Popular science books mostly tell us that human development was driven by competition by aggressive individuals over a scarce landscape. Hrdy's work, which emphasises the bleeding obvious: that humans succeed best at, and in fact can't survive without, highly complex forms of cooperation, perhaps plays less well to a world riven by tensions, in which the relatively powerful need reason and after reason to argue for the need to maintain that privilege, even at the great human cost to the rest.
*Calm down, de Waal and Diamond fans (I'm def a de Waal fan, and might be a Diamond fan if his fans weren't generally so bloody likely never to have read anything by anyone else). I'm not arguing either of these two promote stupidity, just that their word tends to get much more attention, and yet don't really tackle the questions they are quoted as being authorities on.
In Mothers and Others, Hrdy elaborates a tightly defended theory: that cooperative parenting developed in humans before our weirdly large brains, and created a precondition for the development of humanity. Along the way, she argues that the intensity of our social skills has an evolutionary driver of babies needing to attract parental and alloparental care; that our extended post-menapausal lifespans developed to facilitate alloparental care by grandmothers; that the reasonably late development of puberty is also to facilitate both extra care of infants from older children, and also a period of training in motherhood which improves survival chances of future offspring; that there are strong biological reward mechanisms for parenting in our brains, and that these vary based on sex (being stronger in women*). The journey to explore this jumps from primate studies to the anthropology of modern hunter-gatherer groups, and even the occasional reference to industrialized societies.
*Sex tends to be described as a binary in well, almost everything produced before about five years ago, but it can just as easily be viewed as a distributed variation, with clusters and correlations around clusters.
Hrdy largely succeeded with me in defending her central hypothesis, perhaps less so with some of the subsidiary hypotheses - and I'm not sure how significant the question of collaborative parenting is to the development of the social human brain, I guess. She convinced me it is at least one lever, but I remain skeptical of overemphasising any one lever. The book is a gem because it is posited so clearly in the world of what so clearly drove our evolution distinct from other primate species, the elaborate social connection and construction of our identity. Hrdy references everything, provides great summaries of current scientific trends and clearly distinguishes between the accepted and the speculative.
Her primatology seemed significantly stronger to me than the anthropology. In general, Hrdy had a disconcerting tendency to jump from evolutionary history of more than 6 million years ago (the point when we diverged from the tree that produced benobos and chimps) to that of a few thousand years ago. She starts by pointing out why this is not useful (and makes the valid point that we lack evidence of pre-neolithic conflicts in the way we have of neolithic conflict, for example) but then just does it anyway.
As an Australian, living on land that humans have been part of for at least 60,000 years, I get particularly narky at science which ignores my continent's significance. Hrdy consistently references human development as if post-Africa history is the neolithic in evolutionary terms. She also tends to describe Aboriginal people as a single group e.g. "the Mbuti of Central Africa, Nayaka foragers of South India, the Batek of Malaysia, Australian Aborigines, and the North American Cree". I can't really expect a book published nearly a decade ago to take account of recent acknowledgement of farming and land cultivation among some Aboriginal communities, but lumping hundreds of different communities into one generalisation is a bit much. That reference indicated one of the other weaknesses, a tendency to romanticised views of belief and social systems in indigenous communities (as opposed to systems of production, where Hrdy is sharply analytical). Hrdy argues that all the groups listed above "share a view of their physical environment as a “giving” place occupied by others who are also liable to be well-disposed and generous". In another point, she uses as an example of cooperative instincts the Hawaiian peoples' gifts to Captain Cook on arrival. Hawaiian gift-giving was part of an intricate patronage-based power system, where accepting gifts involved accepting authority as well; and far from assuming others are likely to be nice, Aboriginal societies such as the Eora peoples in NSW function through an intricate system of responsibilities/rights to country, violation of which once incurred punishments that could result in death. A sense that country is maintained, not changed, by humanity seems likely to come from long experience of survival and balance.
Hrdy's forays into modern society were just as stretched. This mainly involved discussing the role of fathers in parenting over time. This is hard stuff, as it intersects so clearly with debates about sex roles in modern society. Hrdy is trying to balance some of her most heartfelt views here: that we have evolved biological mechanisms to ensure high-quality child care, with an acknowledgement that much of modern sex roles are socially constructed. Part of this is looking at whether the involvement of fathers is essential to human survival. I wasn't convinced by her use of modern abandonment rates, and even less so by her suggestion that the fact that the rates of false parentage are much higher in the DNA tests requested by suspicious men than those done randomly means men have some kind of natural mechanism to identify infidelity (especially since the former is around 30%: 70% of men who suspect they are not the father - or are trying to avoid child support payments - actually are.). She is on much stronger ground with studies that show differential oxytocin responses between men and women, and explores the variety of human construction of families, which always involves mothers and sometimes involves intense father care. This points to what anthropology would say: we have the potential for strong male bonding to children, in fact, we have the potential to construct the societies we want to live in.
So now, as is my cranky wont, much of this review is discussing the weak spots. But none of this material is central to Hrdy's thesis, nor does it undermine her broad conclusions. The primate studies are wonderful, well-detailed and pointing to uncomfortable truths for the "aggressive men make us who we are" mob. I'll rea

[Radiantflux · Rating 4 out of 5]

36th book for 2018.

I, like countless other parents, was overjoyed to feel my new born daughter grasp my finger minutes after her birth. What I didn't understand at the time was that this reflex allows newborns in our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees, to hold onto their mother's fur as they hang upside-down and are carried everywhere for the first few months of life.

If asked what are the keys differences between humans and our cousins the Great Apes, most primatologists would point to language and the ability to cooperate. Hrdy points out that an equally remarkable difference is our willingness to share the care of our babies with others. Chimpanzee mothers will under no circumstances allow ANYONE to hold their baby for months after their birth, to do so would invite likely death of the infant. Humans are unique in this regard amongst the Great Apes, and one of very few primate species to do so. This ability to share parenting allows humans in tribal societies give birth at far greater rate (every 3-4 years) than other Great Apes (e.g., every 7-8 years for Orangutans)

In this densely argued book, drawing equally on both ethology and ethnology, Hrdy offers a revolutionary take on human childrearing practices, and puts forward the argument that our basic sociality (and our theory of mind) is rooted in this basic difference.

4-stars.

[Anne Van · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.....when a book makes you re-think your assumptions, explore all kinds of new ideas, and laugh at the same time, give it credit! The writer, a sociobiologist asks the endlessly fascinating question of "Why us, and not them?", why are we humans and the other great apes aren't. I always thought the reason being we've got bigger brains because hunting required co-ordination and language. But, the writer challenges that idea and develops the idea that the way humans shared infant and child care, with nurturing fathers, older girl siblings, great aunts and mostly grandmothers, that really made the difference.

[Judyta Szacillo]

A fascinating read it would be if it was not for the endless reiterating of the same points in the narrative. I get easily bored when I need to read the same information or opinion more than once or twice. This is why I've given the book no stars, for I did not finish it despite its interesting matter.

[Lucylucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Faszinierende und inspirierende Gedanken. Mein neuer Lieblingsbegriff: Allomütter

[Catina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Full review to come.
Veredict: author to avoid. What to read instead: Donna Haraway's "Primate visions".
Don't waste your time. There's zero science in this book, plenty of dumb and unworkable ideas, and nothing new or interesting. If you've ever read a tract about how humans practiced "primitive communism" and raised children communally (and, depending on the writer, maybe they practiced group marriage as well), you've read this book too. It's basically wish-fulfilment for idiots, and the author's justification for being an incompetent, neglectful mother cuckoo.

The author was (still is) seriously behind the times. The entitled and lazy wealthy mother demographic has since moved on to even more massively unrealistic (and batshit) pastures, and propaganda tracts like this one should reflect that (and pander for good measure). She should publish a new, updated and improved version of this drivel. Instead of the revisionist pseudohistory she preaches in the current version, she should preach the following tale... Back in the Golden Age that was the Pleistocene(TM), egg donations, IVF, and gestational surrogacy were common, accepted, and free of charge (duh!). Such was the bygone garden of Eden. It was only with the advent of agriculture, urban living, private property, and the Judeo-Christian religions that Evil Patriarchal Men(TM) made it illegal to extract eggs from a woman, and banned IVF (which was quickly forgotten, and wasn't rediscovered until the 21st century). Those same evil, anti-fun men decreed that from then on, fetuses were to grow inside the womb of the woman who provided the eggs used in their creation - thus ending tens of thousands of years of common and accepted gestational surrogacy. Those same men also decreed that people had to pay for things and that at least some people had to work for a living. People could no longer stay in bed all day playing video games and starting arguments on social media, women had to gestate their own fetuses (often while working - the horror!), and paradise was lost forever.

In case you can't tell, the book belongs to the "The utopia I wish I lived in totally existed in prehistory, and we should re-establish it!" genre of fantasy revisionist pseudohistory (up there with "Sapiens", "The world until yesterday", "The naked ape", and many other pieces of anti-science garbage). Those types of books follow a predictable pattern/structure, and share certain characteristics: the very little science there is in them doesn't support the author's fantasies, factual errors abound (as do distortions and other liberties taken with facts), and last but not least - the author uses a particularly corrosive type of Gish Gallop. Said Gish Gallop consists of including as many animal species as possible (regardless of how related they are to humans and regardless of how well they support the desired conclusions), and of including as many human cultural groups as possible (especially so-called "hunter-gatherers") - again, regardless of how well their inclusion supports the desired conclusions. The author relies on that classic Gish Gallop liberally and shamelessly.

Practically all the primatological data the author uses is inaccurate. For instance, the utopia that she insists was totally real in prehistory doesn't exist in any primate species - including our closest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos). This is a problem for the author, because human nature is similar to the nature of our closest relatives, and evolution doesn't magically lead to whatever you wish it did - internal constraints abound, and there are rules. There's also the problem of saying "animal species X does this, so we should do it too!" but then not promoting that species as a role model in any other area/sense (this also applies to human cultures you present as role models based on a single trait, of course). Anyway, no primate species does this "every female in the group has to babysit brats that aren't theirs, and males are obliged to provision children that may or may not be theirs" bullshit that the author is advocating. Only the genetic/biological mother is responsible for providing, protecting (with a few exceptions), and educating/teaching/training her children - this is true for the vast majority of mammals, not only primates. Back when the author first wrote this book, we already knew that males perform physical care of young (to varying degrees) in a wide variety of taxa - including primates. Science has marched on since then, and now we have much more and better information about paternal care in the animal world.

Pointing out all of the author's ignorance about primatology would take years, so I'll comment on only a few other specific examples.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, I have to be honest. I didn't REALLY finish this book. I assigned it for a class which met for 10 hrs/wk, I gave the class a week to read it, and I ended up reading it along with the class while also doing all my day-to-day course prep and grading essays. I found it fascinating and thoughtful, but I had to skim the last few chapters to stay on schedule. Most of my students found it a tough read, and I do think Hrdy is writing for a well-educated and motivated audience, but she won a few ardent fans from among them. I would have happily read the whole thing over the course of a weekend if I had had the time. Her discussions of child-rearing among hunter-gatherers, and the wealth of accompanying photos, have particularly stayed with me. Also, after reading her discussion of hormonal changes in fathers, I'm dying to know if new grandparents show hormonal changes as well. My sister has just had a baby, my parents' first grandchild, and I sure do wish I could take some blood samples!

[Alyssa Tuininga · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard book for me to review. First of all, I was expecting genetics, and evolutionary science and instead, I got a lot of anthropology, primatology, and sociology. I feel like a lot of assumptions she makes are big reaches and very biased. (For example, she assumes that modern hunter-gatherer societies are equivalent to long-past hunter-gatherer societies.) I found her very repetitive, the data very dense, and honestly a bit boring.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am changing... my books, my books about chimps and mating, and my emo quotes and books were everything to me... They were my life... And I am changing. I struggled to concentrate while reading this book because I would have rather been somewhere else. It's weird how one can change in a matter of seconds, hm... let's say hours. This book was not so fascinating, because I knew these facts so well... But I loved the last part. I loved it. It was brilliant.

Indeed, Hawks argues that some of the fastest-evolving genes in the human genome are those associated with the development of the central nervous system. His views are consistent with the discovery of new genetic variants responsible for increased brain size that are probably no more than 6,000 years old. Under strong positive selection, these variants have spread rapidly. As one evolutionist has quipped: “The ten or so [hominin] species that preceded modern humans came and went at a rate of about 200,000 years per species. Ours began some 130,000 years ago, so we could be just about due for a change.” It will not matter how spectacularly well prosocial tendencies served humans in the past if the underpinnings for such traits remain unexpressed and thus can no longer be favored by selection. Over evolutionary time, traits no longer used eventually disappear.
No one doubts that organisms like fish benefit from being able to see. That is why they have eyes. When reared in total darkness, however, fish like the small cave-dwelling characin fish of Mexico cease to develop their capacity for vision. Even when reintroduced to sunlight and reared outside, populations of characin fry long isolated in the dark fail to regain sight. As a simple matter of somatic economy, unused traits no longer favored by natural selection are lost, while somatic or neurological resources are diverted for uses elsewhere.
Viewed from the perspective of some evolutionary theorist surveying humans 20,000 years hence, our powerful impulses to empathize with others, to give, share, and seek reciprocation, might seem like nothing more than transient phases in the ongoing evolution of the species. Although there is a widely held assumption (known as Dollo’s Law) that evolutionary processes are irreversible, don’t count on it. Dollo’s Law is more nearly a description of the deep history of some organisms than a universally applicable natural law like gravity.38 A far more basic and universal tenet of evolutionary biology states that “the removal of an agent of selection can sometimes bring about rapid evolutionary consequences.”39
To all the reasons people might have to worry about the future of our species—including the usual depressing litany of nuclear proliferation, global warming, emerging infectious diseases, or crashing meteorites—add one more having to do with just what sort of species our descendants millennia hence might belong to. If empathy and understanding develop only under particular rearing conditions, and if an ever-increasing proportion of the species fails to encounter those conditions but nevertheless survives to reproduce, it won’t matter how valuable the underpinnings for collaboration were in the past. Compassion and the quest for emotional connection will fade away as surely as sight in cave-dwelling fish.
I have no doubt that our descendants thousands of years from now (whether on this planet or some other) will be bipedal, symbol-generating apes. They will probably be technologically proficient in realms we do not even dream of yet, as well as every bit as competitive and Machiavellian as chimpanzees are now, and probably even more intelligent than people today. What is not certain is whether they will still be human in ways we now think of as distinguishing our species—that is, empathic and curious about the emotions of others, shaped by our ancient heritage of communal care.

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredible work of psychology that can be read by anyone. It is inspiring to see how an academic like Hrdy can pull off writing in a way that is enjoyable and witty, and still always controlled according to and relatively detailed regarding the key findings or ideas she aims to communicate. Her thesis is that the distinctive evolutionary history of humankind can be usefully explained by a focus on the role of alloparenting (i.e., adults who are not one’s biological parents helping one’s parents in taking care of one in infancy and childhood). In particular, Hrdy argues that alloparenting makes it possible for humans to have longer childhoods, for parents to be able to more effectively acquire food and survive, and for everyone involved in the community to do better—and then, given these prior reasons for alloparenting to have an adaptive, stable place in life, eventually a virtuous cycle formed between the desirability of alloparenting and the behaviors in infants generated through evolutionary, selective pressures. Infants who have better social skills—who can, for example, figure out which adults are most trustworthy and behave in ways that are attractive to those adults or get them to care for them—are more likely to survive. Then, alloparenting also becomes more of a thing, due to infants being more desirable to take care of from the adults’ points of view.

I got convinced by her thesis, and there are swathes of interesting facts and findings Hrdy presents over the course of arguing for it. For example, she presents findings on the behaviors in great apes concerning the care of infants, by parents and alloparents. A set of findings that sticks out in my memory is that most non-human great ape mothers will never abandon or hurt their infants, no matter how deformed they are at birth. One orangutan was observed caring for her handless and footless infant, even though this involved carrying the infant all of the time, which got in the way of her own survival (infants usually rather are able to cling to their mothers, so that the mothers are freed up to do various activities like getting food and moving around). In contrast, humans historically have rarely been like this. In the vast majority of ancient societies, and still today in many, infants get abandoned or killed if they are undesirable in light of certain physical characteristics. If I remember correctly, Hrdy presented these findings under the context of making the point that human infants can make a difference in how good of care they receive from adults and so have been motivated to adjust their behaviors as to elicit care (whereas for non-human great ape infants, such adjustments would make no difference, since mothers are unconditionally caring already). But of course these findings are suggestive in other ways.

There is also a chapter on attachment theory, where Hrdy gives an excellent criticism of how this research is typically conducted and its underlying assumptions that get one reinforced by the experiments thereby formed (i.e., assumptions that we humans are ‘meant’ to have one primary caretaker and will have our own personalities formed by our relationship exclusively to them; as opposed to that we’re ‘meant’ to have a whole host of caretakers, some of which can be comparably primary).

As a whole, I’m left with the reminder that it is difficult to defend hypotheses that tackle personal or social levels of analysis on the basis of evolutionary reasoning. I find Hrdy’s thesis compelling only under the context of thinking of it as one adaptive process, among many, many others, which could intersect in ways such that perhaps her thesis would require serious revision. But it is nevertheless compelling in this way.

[Julio Astudillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind-blowing.
This is my first evolutionary psychology book written by a woman. And it actually confirms what evolutionary psychology states about women: they are able to understand and be more empathetic to every living being. So, while male minds focus on sexual relations, abuse, war and violence, we have a book that focuses on cooperation. Fascinating.

The book is not biased. I had the chance to read "Sex at dawn" by Christopher Ryan, and I couldn't help to notice what a bunch of crap was written, while tearing down evolutionary psychologyst's arguments on many fields. This book covers evolutionary psychology, and even mentions patriarchy, but not in the -progressive context-, but in terms of understanding male mind and the dawn of civilization. Patriarchy is not something we, males wanted to write down in order to fuck up any opportunity for women to success. Every part and every chapter of our civilization is both an evolutionary biological novelty, thus, changing and molding behavioral patterns.

She explains that there were times in which small societies on the Pleistocene used to be matrilineal. Women are the ones who create humans beings, and resources needed to be where the females or mothers-to-be were. When we discovered agriculture, things changed. We started to stock up on resources and changing the patterns in which society was built; this is where we (males) in Richard Wrangham words, started cohesions based on "coalitionary proactive aggression" and bam, we started a patrilocal and patrilineal distribution of resources. To sum up, De Beauvoir's and Foucault thesis about power, are debunked because we can now explain patriarchy in terms of male vestigial psychology and we now know that not everything in human behavior is about "power", as Foucault explained.

The book is about cooperation, and breeding patterns. It is mentioned that not everything is about the nuclear family (mom, dad and children); that kind of family is the product of a novelty, human civilization. However, using ethnographic studies, we now know that alloparenting is as natural as having thirst in primates, including us. The book does not say that other studies about evolutionary psychology are wrong, it just states that human (both male and female) are a mixture of many points of view and that everything we are going to study, must be read through evolutionary lens.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I forgot to review this two months ago! A thorough work in human evolution by debunking the common assumption that human groups consist of the nuclear family. She argues for the inclusion of "alloparents" or "allomothers" as part of the caring cohort among infants. I love the primate research included here the evolution of mirror neurons that enables infants to read faces and decoding the mental and social cues of their caretakers. This include constant contact like cooing or motherese speak that maintain contact between infant and mother even in the company of others. Even better, infants eventually develop empathy, dominance and achievement with a non parental caretaker. More curiously, some father species change alongside a gestating mother but males could be absent with little effect on the infant as long as an alloparent was around. Much more technical evidence was presented. This is a similar questioning of long-held assumption about reconstructing small group in our human past like in Graeber's Dawn of Humanity.

My only gripe with this book and the less than one star is one limitation on the comparative method that Hrdy does not explain. Anthropology as a discipline is mute about the way they compare groups. While I was reading this book, I was really annoyed when Hrdy would jump primate species (i mean marmosets are different than tamarins and the large apes!), include dogs, and birds. Most times even relying on the hunter and gatherer database, with some caution. As an anthropologist, I no doubt understand or take the caution when she plucks facts here and there, but I worry for ordinary readers who may strengthen even more stereotypes about nomadic hunter and gatherers with primates or at the lower level. This is subtle. It got me diving into the unspoken method in anthropology - cross cultural comparison. I'm still reading and finishing Comparison as Method by Candea and it has been an eye opening book I recommend. It got me into the path about clarifying even my own way of invoking comparison across features and cultures. This for me is the most important jump off point of this work.

[Ron Peters · Rating 4 out of 5]

At one time I read a lot about evolutionary theories on the development of human altruism and hypersociality, so I picked up Hrdy’s book. She’s an anthropologist and primatologist whose views made her an outlier in the field. The book sat on my shelf for ages, but I’m glad I finally read it.

A key problem with proving causation in evolutionary theory and sociobiology is that most of this work is argued from analogy with the behavior of other animals and the lifeways of relatively modern hunter-gatherer societies. Hrdy’s book suffers from this, but it’s engagingly written and weaves together facts from a boggling array of scientific fields. I think of it as mainly involving theory-building and hypothesis generation, but it is based on interesting new material.

In some ways, her work is a riposte to the typical anthropological view (originating with male scholars) which argues that large human brains and cooperation both rose in response to the need of males to hunt in groups and, eventually, engage in wars.

Hrdy claims that our long period of developmental dependency made it too costly to raise children alone, leading to cooperative group parenting, especially involving grandmothers. She says these practices predate homo sapiens; that we became emotionally modern before we became cognitively modern because we needed to develop empathy, mind-reading, and cooperativeness for our children to survive. This is also why we have cute babies that babble happily, smile, and reach out to people – let’s call this one the Baby Yoda hypothesis.

The final chapter is interesting, albeit highly speculative. Hrdy explores the idea that the patriarchy is eroding our cooperative and empathic traits, resulting, among other things, in a rising epidemic of disorganized attachment among modern children. Because of this shift, humans will, perhaps, evolve into something very different from what we have been in the past.

[Jana Rađa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without the capacity to put ourselves cognitively and emotionally in someone else’s shoes, to feel what they feel, to be interested in their fears and motives, longings, griefs, vanities, and other details of their existence, without this mixture of curiosity about and emotional identification with others, a combination that adds up to mutual understanding and sometimes even compassion, Homo sapiens would never have evolved at all. [...] But what was the impetus?

I finished the book two months ago, more or less, but decided to think about it for a while before putting my thoughts down. Much to my amazement, the end product of a substantial amount of deliberation on my part is not a long review... It is a quite short one: The book is brilliant.

I read Hrdy's Mother Nature last year and loved it. This one is magnificent as well.

It's not the "trivia". Hrdy does include a lot of data and references, but it's the mind-shifting, eye-opening aspect to her writing that works wonders for me.

The book ends with a cautionary note:

If empathy and understanding develop only under particular rearing conditions, and if an ever-increasing proportion of the species fails to encounter those conditions but nevertheless survives to reproduce, it won’t matter how valuable the underpinnings for collaboration were in the past. Compassion and the quest for emotional connection will fade away as surely as sight in cave-dwelling fish.

Terrifying but true.

[Sarah Keuper · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book prompted such a fundamental rethinking of people and family structures that many things that had never quite added up for me around how modern humans deal with reproduction and supporting families suddenly make sense.

Two major things are true about human reproduction: we produce children that are profoundly dependent for an extraordinarily long time, and we do it faster than can truly be managed alone. Mothers or even traditional nuclear families, can't really support as many children as we are capable or producing. Ergo, there must be some other system to support our slow-maturing babies. Everything else in the book spins logically out from those basic facts.

For example, babies are extraordinarily good at attracting alloparents (non-parent figures who care for, feed and otherwise support children) and discerning who might be enticed into interacting with them or feeding them and who might harm them. But also, females live well beyond their reproductive years on average, most likely because the support of an attentive grandmother increases babies' chances of survival by something like 40%.

[Aron Wagner · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating mix of cultural anthropology and evolutionary biology, this book helped me see human development and even my own life in a different way. Hrdy's writing is technical, but fairly accessible to the curious and engaged reader. I found myself making a lot of connections to a very different book, "Helping Children Succeed" by Paul Tough. Hrdy writes, "Again and again, the mother's perception of social support and the infant's sense of security... seem to matter more than any actual improvement in material resources available to the mother-infant pair." This synchs with Tough's contentions that one of the most powerful thing society can do for under-resourced communities is provide meaningful support for the parents of young children and that THIS will have a powerful impact on their cognitive and social-emotional health. Whatever you do, don't skip the last chapter! Hrdy brings home all of these powerful ideas about cooperative parenting and hominin emotional evolution to what it means for us today.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was dense and full of great information. It wasn't great as an audio book and I think I would have retained more had I read the book rather than listened to it. The author is takes a lot care in providing background information, laying out her argument, explaining the opposing theories, and the flaws in existing knowledge and theories. In my opinion, she spends more time than needed talking about other theories and what they are missing. I understand those details are important but I think I would have been better served by hearing more details or more research that supported her argument. I also wish she had been more clear at the start exactly what her theory was; it seemed like she took a long time to build up to her thesis, even though all of the previous information was germane and supportive- the thesis just felt misplaced. Perhaps however, that is my liberal arts bias and her structure is more aligned with scientific writings.

[Pieter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was a good and thought provoking read, even though how much of the author's observations and arguments still hold water more than a decade after the book was written is up for debate. Mind you, I doubt the core premise of the book about it taking many caretakers to raise a human kid is wrong, nor do I think the many comparisons with how other animals raise their kids (including some to me very surprising ones) have changed much. It is a clinical and evolutionary biological approach to the subject without going into the scientific details which I appreciate, but at times feels odd when discussing various human cultures (including a somewhat odd use of "pre-colonial"). I do felt at times the author though my memory was faulty in that there was a lot of repetition when discussing certain subjects (most notably the monkeys from the new world and their cooperative childcare). Still, it was an interesting read.

[Alexios Xifaras · Rating 5 out of 5]

Winner of 2012 W.W. Howells Prize. It is no coincidence that all the leading names in the field of biological anthropology and sociobiology (e.g. Wrangham, Fuentes, Tomasello, etc) refer to Hrdy's work when it comes to "alloparenting". The main thesis of the book revolves around the fact that both humans and the monkeys of Callitrichidae family exercise "alloparenting" in their communities/groups and both of the before mentioned species are the most cooperative among the primates. Therefore 1) obviously alloparenting plays a significant role in the development of cooperative behavior and 2) perhaps the chimps and the bonobos are not the best model for studying the evolution of human behavior. Of course the book is very rich and contains much more than I mentioned. In short: This book is a reference work an it must be read by anyone who studies or is interested about human nature.

[Walt · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the few books attempting to explain "what makes us human" without discounting how we are still fundamentally primates and not of a radically different essence than other living things. Humans have developed a distinctive type of relationship to others due to a history of cooperative breeding among kin. This book explores the evolutionary steps since our common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos that have contributed to our longer lifespans and community-based child-rearing systems. While it does still present a narrow definition of "sapience" and sometimes neglect bonobo traits in reconstructing ape ancestors, I find the logic presented here quite compelling and useful in understanding how our social structures could better serve children.

[Per Kraulis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good description of the theories and investigations that focus on the nurturing of infants as a central aspect of human evolution. A mother simply cannot bring up a child all on her own, she needs a lot of assistance and collaboration from other mothers, fathers, relatives, older children, grandmothers and so on. How did this dependency come about? What does it entail, and what are the consequences? This book summarizes the research in this field up to 2008. It should be required reading for anyone interested in how humanity works.

[Catriona · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought-provoking, thoroughly researched and highly engaging look at how, why and when we humans took the crucial step that led us away from our ape ancestors and down our own evolutionary pathway. The book is fascinating, looking at the development of motherhood, parenthood and community child-rearing in apes and other birds and animals. I learned a lot from this book, and I will be looking to learn more as a result.

[Steve Matthews · Rating 2 out of 5]

A great deal of speculation couched in rigorous arguments about how empathy and cooperation evolved in humans ending with an odd caution that because some groups of humans without empathy can now survive and reproduce, that the evolved traits of empathy, compassion and cooperation could be lost as humans continue to evolve.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am afraid this was more academic than I anticpated. I do like to read about primates, and how we developed our personalities and our societies. I learned the definition of cooperative breeding and allomaternal. All things you take for granted growing up. The conclusion wonders where humans will go in their next step to evolution.