Mothers and Others

by Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer

• ISBN13: 9780674060326
• ISBN10: 0674060326
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-04-15
• Publisher: Belknap Pr

Summary

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 (hint: itrs"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.

Author Biography

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mother Nature and The Woman That Never Evolved, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California-Davis.

Table of Contents

Apes on a Plane	p. 1
Why Us and Not Them?	p. 33
Why It Takes a Village	p. 65
Novel Developments	p. 111
Will the Real Pleistocene Family Please Step Forward?	p. 143
Meet the Alloparents	p. 175
Babies as Sensory Traps	p. 209
Grandmothers among Others	p. 233
Childhood and the Descent of Man	p. 273
Notes	p. 297
References	p. 341
Acknowledgments	p. 403
Index	p. 406
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