The time I had set aside to rewrite this review was spent at the clinic with my son, getting him antibiotics and a tetanus shot after a skateboard accident left sizable deposits of his skin on the neighbourhood pavement.
Even now, when my children are older and in many ways can take care of themselves, I want an allomother. My children aren't self-provisioning yet, nor would they have been back in the “old” Pleistocene days, when allomothers often made the difference between life and death.
In 2009, what we don't know about human evolution dwarfs what we do know the way a watermelon dwarfs a pea. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California-Davis, and one of the most brilliant pioneers in her field, has exponentially expanded our knowledge, breaking open the whole area of mothering and female sexuality in evolutionary studies.
Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Belknap/Harvard University Press, 422 pages, $38.95
Her first book, The Woman That Never Evolved, published in 1981, was a scientifically pure, clear-eyed look at the role of female sexuality in shaping human evolution. Her second, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection, was groundbreaking in its examination of mothering and evolution.
In Mother Nature, Hrdy radically reframed the way we look at sex selection, infanticide, postpartum depression, sibling rivalry, maternal resource allocation and breastfeeding, just to name a few topics. Which children survived to reproduce and pass on their genes and which didn't had everything to do with the behaviour of their mothers.
Both of these earlier books were academic works with crossover appeal to lay readers. They were named variously: New York Times Notable Book, one of the best books of the year by Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal, outstanding Academic Book of the Year and finalist for a Pen (West) Literary Award.
Mothers and Others is overflowing with fascinating information and thinking
Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, Hrdy's much-awaited new book, is another mind-expanding, paradigm-shifting, rigorously scientific yet eminently readable treatise. Somehow less depressing than Mother Nature, which explored much of the dark side of mothering – yes, there is a very dark side – Mothers and Others lays the foundation for a new hypothesis about human evolution.
Traits that anthropologists used to believe separated humans from other great apes – tool-making, walking, hunting co-operatively, fighting wars – have all been found to exist in other species. The new thinking is that what distinguishes human beings is “the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions.” Included in this conceptual basket are what Hrdy calls prosocial or emotionally modern behaviours, such as identification, altruism, compassion, co-operation, gift-giving, mind-reading, mutual understanding, goodwill and caring.
Hrdy believes that the origin of prosocial behaviour in humans is to be found in the way our ancestors raised their offspring. With modern primates, infants are raised exclusively by their mothers until they are weaned, but early human infants were too high-cost for a female to provision alone. Hrdy re-examines data regarding hunter-gatherer societies and compares it with new research in comparative primatology, sociobiology, neuroendocrinology, human behavioural ecology and cognitive psychology and concludes that early hominin mothers had to rely on help from allomothers to raise surviving offspring. Allomothers include grandmothers, sisters, cousins, older siblings, non-reproductive adults and pre-reproductive children in a flexible child-rearing system called co-operative breeding.
Co-operative breeding, Hrdy claims, provided the evolutionary foundation for bigger brains, longer lifespans and language by making the extended childhood and the high caloric resources possible in conditions very unlike those of modern humans.
