Mothers and Others

By S. Hrdy. 2009

723 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of ape 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" teaches 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 (hint: it's called the Showing-Off Hypothesis), "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.

Subfields: History, Literature and Literary Theory, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bdf9ed1e8c180a8fb1866aef33c536090fd08a50

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Citations in the corpus

Self-organization of punishment in structured populations (2012, background): “Yet humans have mastered the act of large-scale cooperation almost to perfection [3, 4], which is something that distinguishes them markedly from other species [5].”
Biology of Termites: A Modern Synthesis (2011, background): “A greatlyextended childhood has indeed been seen as key to modern human evolution (Hrdy 2009; Konner 2010), and it was certainly crucial to unlocking the potential of termites to dominate the globe.”
The burden of proof for a cultural group selection account (2014, background): “Perhaps the earliest cultural norms merely solidified the bonds of kinship and reciprocity that were evolving through participation in systems of cooperative breeding (Chapais 2008; Hrdy 2009).”
Human behavioral ecology: current research and future prospects (2013, background): “These analyses typically find support for the hypothesis that women adopt a flexible cooperative breeding strategy where they corral help variously from the fathers of their children, other men, and pre- and postreproductive women (Hrdy 2009).”
Men, women and STEM: Why the differences and what should be done? (2020, background): “To fit them to these roles, women may have evolved a stronger attentiveness to the needs of the young, and to people in general (Hrdy, 2009; S. E. Taylor et al., 2000), whereas men may have evolved a stronger interest in the tools used for hunting and warfare (Archer, 2019; Geary, 2010).”
On the relationship between the “default mode network” and the “social brain” (2012, positive): “The “cooperative breeding hypothesis” proposed by Hrdy and colleagues (Burkart et al., 2009; Hrdy, 2009) suggests that it was the case, but that other apes and our common ancestor lacked the motivational preconditions that were required to developed full “human-style” mentalizing.”
Evolutionary dynamics of higher-order interactions in social networks (2020, methodology): “The impetus for this remarkable other-regarding abilities can be attributed to the difficulties in rearing offspring that survived, which the genus Homo experienced from the onset of its existence [2].”
Plasticity in Human Life History Strategy (2012, background): “Instead, hu- mans can be described as a cooperatively breeding species in which reproducing females rely on flexible patterns of alloparental care as a fundamental component of their reproductive strategy (Hill and Hurtado 2009; Hrdy 2005, 2009; Kramer and Ellison 2010).”
How Our Ancestors Broke through the Gray Ceiling (2012, background): “We propose that as in other mammals and birds, the adoption of cooperative breeding (Hrdy 2005, 2009) had allowed H. erectus (p ergaster) to increase its rmax, which, given its value near the gray ceiling, made possible an expansion of its brain size.”