Mothers and Others

by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

  Beginning around age three, children are able to interpret the feelings and intentions of others and even to imagine what it is like to be someone else altogether.83 By age four, children display sensitivity to other people’s self-image, beginning to flatter and attempting to ingratiate themselves with them.84 The more older siblings a child has, engaging (and also perhaps tormenting) her, the better a child does on tests that require her to see the world the way someone else does. On closer examination, however, it turns out that it is not so much the number of siblings that matters as the fact that some are older. Further research has shown that what really counts is for a child to have the opportunity to interact with older, more experienced caretakers—mentors and sponsors who do not even need to be related.85 It helps of course if these older individuals express an interest in the child’s feelings and mental state.86

  Children growing up in extended families with kin and as-if kin in residence not only benefit in all the material ways detailed in the preceding chapter, they also enjoy new cognitive dimensions to their social lives. Not surprisingly, children accustomed to interacting with others perform better on false-belief tests and in games that require an ability to read and empathize with other people’s mental states, including being able to read between the lines of expressed motivations. Children with lots of caregivers exhibit these capacities at an earlier age. Similar processes of “contagion” may explain the case of human-reared chimpanzees who, with their extra exposure to human allomothers, end up performing better at tasks requiring a theory of mind and the interpretation of someone else’s intentions. Even though humans are generally much better than other apes at recognizing that another individual has a mental state and intentions they can affect, apes too (especially those reared by people) possess quasi-human mind-reading capacities that are activated under particular developmental conditions.87

  Capacities for intersubjective engagement begin to develop right from birth but are refined and expanded with age as maturing infants spend more time in the custody of older children. But fathers, older kinswomen, and especially juvenile allomothers can also be direct competitors for food and other resources. A !Kung toddler’s time spent in a mixed age play-group provides novel opportunities to learn about status-seeking, posturing, and deceit, and to expand earlier lessons on how to read emotional commitment and predict generosity versus stinginess. (Peabody Museum/Marshall Expedition image 2001.29.412)

  No one doubts that large-brained, anatomically modern humans who start to toddle upright by one year of age and begin to talk by two, and who right from an early age exhibit earnest concern for others and take pleasure in sharing their mental states, are different from orangutans or chimpanzees. It is from interactions with more mature minds both “benign and reflective” that children begin to think of themselves as an organism with a mind. What I am proposing, however, is that some of these emotional qualities that distinguish modern humans from other apes, especially mind reading combined with empathy and developing a sense of self, emerged earlier in our evolutionary history than anatomically modern humans did.88 The critical factor in this emergence of intersubjective capacities was the novel developmental context in which generation after generation of early humans grew up, different from that of any other ape before.

  The ancestors of modern orangutans probably grew up in the company of just their mother or possibly one older sibling. Ancestors of chimpanzees spent at least the first six months of life interacting mostly with their mothers, rarely encountering other members of the community and, importantly, never depending on them.89 As apes mature, older infants and especially juveniles will eagerly seek out available playmates—any age and indeed almost any species will do. The urge to play and seek out partners to play with does not distinguish humans from other apes. What would have distinguished the ancestors of humans from their shared ancestors with other apes would have been that, right from the first days and months of life, they needed to monitor and engage others. Early humans would have been born into social worlds that were more complex and more challenging from the outset. If empathy is contagious, caught from older associates, creatures living like orangutans or chimpanzees would have started later and never had anything like the opportunity humans had to “catch” and then use the requisite neural equipment from an early age. Whatever mind-reading potentials there might have been among the ancestors of chimpanzees and orangutans were left largely latent. Thus, Mother Nature had neither the opportunity nor the occasion to favor and refine them.

  Compared with modern chimpanzees or with 6-million-year-old common ancestors of humans and other apes, people today are born with different social aptitudes, and—I am convinced—so were our ancestors at the beginning of the Pleistocene who would have been emotionally modern long before they were big-brained and anatomically modern. Join me in a thought experiment. Pretend that cognitive psychologists could go back in time and carry out experiments aimed at determining how infants among our early hominin ancestors acquired mental attribution skills. At the end of the first year of life, how would a sample of protohuman ape babies who were cared for exclusively by their mother differ from comparable babies with multiple caretakers? Based on what we know from the studies summarized above, I believe we could predict with some confidence the following outcomes. First, ape babies held by others would pay more attention to their mother, to where she was, to her facial expression, voice, and moods. Second, babies cared for by multiple caretakers would be more aware of distinctions between self and others, better able to read the mental states of conspecifics, and capable of integrating information about their own intentions and those of others—indeed, perhaps several others.

  As a four-month-old Trobriand girl sits in her mother’s lap, an older sibling crawls up behind her and playfully makes eye contact, then waves his hand in front of the baby. This little girl is probably wondering what her brother is doing, and perhaps what he is intending. No wonder children with older siblings are more likely to develop a theory of mind sooner; they need one. (I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt/Human Ethology Archives)

  By the end of the first year of life, then, little apes with multiple caretakers would have been challenged in ways that no young ape had ever been challenged before. These tremendously needy hominin youngsters would have had to attend to and learn to read cues of maternal commitment as well as to decipher moods and intentions of others who might be seduced into caring for them. How best to do so? Through crying or through coyness? With smiles, funny faces, gurgling, or babbling? Or failing that, by forgoing enticing communication and resorting to angry attempts to control them—a topic to which I return in Chapter 9. Early hominins had genotypes almost identical to those of their mother-care-only ape relations, but their early experiences would have turned them into quite different, emotionally more modern organisms.

  PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF SHARED CARE

  Few animals are born needier or remain dependent longer than humans. At some point in our distant past, care and provisioning from alloparents began to permit human mothers to breed at a faster pace than any ape ever before. Some anthropologists date this transformation around 1.8 million years ago, and in Chapter 9 I elaborate on why I agree with them, though I do not claim to know for sure. Nevertheless, once mothers embarked on an evolutionary course of producing unusually large, slow-maturing, needy, and long-dependent offspring, there was no turning back. Without help from others, such children could not survive.

  No wonder human mothers and their children are sensitive to how much social support they are likely to receive. Like marmosets and tamarin mothers, who also depend on others to help them care for and provision their young, hominin mothers took their perception of alloparental support into account before emotionally committing. Like callitrichids, but in contrast to other apes, early hominin babies were born into a world where nonmaternal caregivers were vitally important not just for the nourishment and protection of infants but for the emergence of full-fledged maternal s
olicitude.

  Most visiting anthropologists surveying this spirited four-way interaction would assume that the two adult Trobrianders are fathers and the infants they hold are their offspring. In fact, as Eibl-Eibesfeldt notes, both men are alloparents. As the man on the right initiates a greeting by urging the infants to shake hands, the more extroverted ten-month-old looks eagerly at his fellow, smiles, and opens his mouth wide with excitement. The six-month-old looks first to the initiating alloparent, then at the other infant, then over at his nearby father, shrinks back a bit, shakes hands, but then timidly pulls his hand back and nestles closer to the alloparent, who seems to be enjoying this quintessentially human comedy of manners very much. (I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt/Human Ethology Archives)

  And yet these creatures were also apes. Thus the stage was set for clever, socially intelligent youngsters to more fully develop the innate gifts for interacting with and manipulating others that all apes are born with. The result was the emergence of quite novel ape phenotypes, which would be exposed to novel selection pressures. Individuals better at meeting the terms of this challenge and developing new dimensions to mind reading would be those best cared for and best fed, and their own mothers would also be more likely to survive. This novel developmental context provided youngsters immediate opportunities and incentives to develop innate aptitudes for engaging others.

  In environments with high child mortality, those with more alloparental assistance would have profited not only by being better comforted or entertained (for babies do enjoy this) but, more importantly, by being better protected and better fed in infancy and through childhood. Once upon a time, “feeling neglected” was more than just “the child’s experience.”90 The others’ level of commitment had life-or-death consequences. Whenever it was that our ancestors adopted alloparental care, it is clear that this mode of childcare—novel for creatures with the minds of apes—would have had profound implications for developing young. So just who were these alloparents likely to be? And why did they help?

  5

  WILL THE REAL PLEISTOCENE FAMILY PLEASE STEP FORWARD?

  There may be human potentialities which date far back in evolutionary time for which new artificially created conditions may find a new use.

  —Margaret Mead (1966)

  Think of the typical textbook image or museum diorama of the early human family. Perhaps a beetle-browed caveman will have his arm draped protectively about his mate. She will be holding their baby. Or perhaps there will be a clustering of beetle-brows near a campfire, with men hauling back the carcass of a just killed antelope. If there is a baby, he is held in the arms of an adult female, likely a woman with milk-swollen breasts. We are meant to take for granted that she is the baby’s mother, for any mother in a state of nature is assumed to remain in continuous contact with her baby, just as any other ape would. But there is a disconnect between iconic portraits of stone-age families and firsthand observations of people who actually live by gathering and hunting. The person holding the baby would often have been an aunt, sibling, or grandmother.

  Exclusive maternal care is implied by museum dioramas and popular illustrations of australopithecines in nuclear family arrangements. (© John Gurche)

  When politicians lament the “decline of the family,” they have in mind departures from the nuclear family: a man, his wife, and their biological children. However, the template for this kind of family dates back only a century or so, at most to Victorian times, and in American contexts not a lot further than the 1950s, when my generation of baby boomers grew up in mostly single-family homes. According to the cultural stereotype, the mother cared for the children while the father went off to his job. Even though there was only a blip in time when a single wage-earner could reliably and predictably support an average family, this myth of the nuclear family, with a nurturing mother at home and a providing father at work, became an American ideal.1

  My library is filled with books having titles like Life without Father: Compelling Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and for Society, or Fatherless in America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, books written by sociologists of the family who, without asking under what historical or economic or social conditions this will be so, take for granted that “children develop best when they are provided with the opportunity to have warm, intimate, continuous and enduring relationships with both their fathers and their mothers.”2 Once it is assumed that paternal investment is “an essential determinant of child and societal well-being,” or that the best way to rear children is in a nuclear family, or that only a man whose “paternity confidence . . . is high” will be willing to care for children, such propositions not only shape public policy, they also shape the questions researchers ask.3

  Routinely, studies are designed to contrast outcomes when children are raised by single mothers versus both parents. Invariably, the results show that children with just one parent, especially children already at risk, do less well, grow up more prone to get into trouble, drop out of school, get pregnant, become unemployed, or go to jail if they are reared by one overburdened person rather than two. Of course, it takes more than one person to rear a child. However, the studies have not been designed to determine whether that second person needs to be male and a genetic parent. What about children raised by a mother plus a grandparent, uncle, or older sibling, compared with those from two-parent families, controlled for socioeconomic status? What about three caretakers, none of whom is the biological parent? Under what circumstances does attention from individuals without a genetic relationship to a child contribute to the child’s well-being? Are there multiple caretaker arrangements that are almost as good, just as good, or even better than two parents? We don’t know, because we rarely asked.4

  Even those who claim to have grown up in a “dysfunctional” family subscribe to widespread stereotypes of what a “functional” family should look like. Religious conservatives took their lead from Adam and Eve, while even secularists—including many scientists—tend to view monogamous nuclear families as “biological phenomena . . . rooted in organs and physiological structures” of the “human animal.”5 Once the idea took hold that the nuclear family is “at heart a biological arrangement for raising children that has always involved fathers as well as mothers,” even otherwise very thoughtful researchers overlooked the need to continuously challenge their underlying assumptions about what children need in order to prosper.6 In particular, they forgot to ask questions about what happens to children living in a wide variety of other human social arrangements. Even without the relevant information at their disposal, politicians concerned with the “breakdown of the family” still manage to sound quite confident about what the optimal childrearing arrangement ought to look like.7

  “Studies have shown,” declared the U.S. president in 2003, “that the ideal is where a child is raised in a married family with a man and a woman.” Thus, instead of funding childcare programs, $1.6 billion was earmarked to fund pro-marriage programs that would tutor people in how to sustain a long-term monogamous relationship.8 Similar preconceptions about what sort of families are best for rearing children led to the expulsion of a 14-year-old California girl from her Christian school not because of anything she had done but because her parents were both women.9 That same year, 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court left standing a Florida law banning adoption of children by two gay men, refusing to hear a challenge to it, apparently because the justices subscribed to the rationale being used to uphold the law by a three-judge panel at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. As the justices put it: “The accumulated wisdom of several millennia of human experience” has demonstrated that the “optimal family structure in which to raise children was one with a mother and father married to each other.”10 Given the role that alloparents have played over the course of human evolution, how did such vital benefactors go unacknowledged for so long?

  “SEX CONTRACTS” FOR REARING COSTLY CHILDREN

 
No creature in the world (unless, just possibly, a bowhead whale) takes longer to mature than a human child does. Nor does any other creature need so much for so long before his acquisition and production of resources matches his consumption.11 Sensitive to this mismatch, evolutionists correctly concluded that someone had to have helped mothers make up the difference between what children need and what a mother by herself could provide. From the outset, they assumed they knew who that someone was. That provider must have been her mate, as Darwin himself opined in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Indeed, it was the hunter’s need to finance slow-maturing children, Darwin thought, that provided the main catalyst for the evolution of our big brains. “The most able men succeeded best in defending and providing for themselves and their wives and offspring,” he wrote. It was the offspring of hunters with “greater intellectual vigor and power of invention” who were most likely to survive.