Made to lose sleep… with support
Humans present a striking paradox: compared to other species, our babies are born extremely immature and require a great deal from caregivers, says Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Davis in the US, and author of several books on evolutionary parenting. Yet the hunter-gatherer environment that our ancestors survived for tens of thousands of years was a difficult one, where humans had to expend a great amount of calories and time simply on procuring food.
Unlike now, though, they had help – lots of it – to devote the necessary time and resourcing to each offspring, while having enough children to allow for population replacement.
“There’s no way that population would not have gone extinct, there’s no way that species could have evolved,” Hrdy says, “unless mothers had had alloparental as well as parental care and provisioning of offspring.”
These “alloparents” included other relatives, particularly grandmothers and older siblings, but often more loosely-related caregivers, too.
Anthropologists observing the Efé of Central Africa, for example, found that 18-week-old infants spend 60% of their time being cared for by someone other than their mother and often are breastfed by someone other than their mother.
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