Angela
Elite member
- Messages
- 21,823
- Reaction score
- 12,329
- Points
- 113
- Ethnic group
- Italian
This isn't the first time I've read this...i'm not sure about it. Maybe this wasn't the case in every hunter-gatherer society. Every decade brings a new theory.
See:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsa...hare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social
"Kristen Hawkes is an anthropologist at the University of Utah. She tries to figure out our past by studying modern hunter-gatherers like the Hadza, who likely have lived in the area that is now northern Tanzania for thousands of years. Groups like this are about as close as we can get to seeing how our early human ancestors might have lived."
"They found that the average hunter went out pretty much every day and was successful on exactly 3.4 percent of those excursions. That meant that, in this society at least, the hunting hypothesis seemed way off the mark. If people here were depending on wild meat to survive, they would starve."
"So if dad wasn't bringing home the bacon, who was? After spending a lot of time with the women on their daily foraging trips, the researchers were surprised to discover that the women, both young and old, were providing the majority of calories to their families and group-mates.
Mostly, they were digging tubers, which are deeply buried and hard to extract. The success of a mother at gathering these tubers correlated with the growth of her child. But something else surprising happened once mom had a second baby: That original relationship went away and a new correlation emerged with the amount of food their grandmother was gathering.
Grandmothers were crucial in this environment to childhood survival. So maybe it wasn't an accident that humans are the only great ape species in which women live so long past reproductive age. If having a helpful grandmother increased a kid's chances of survival, natural selection may well have started selecting for older and older women. (This endowment would have passed also to human men.)
A primatologist says, "If young kids were being fed by people besides mom, she thinks that over evolutionary time, this could have led humans to develop the deep social orientation that characterizes our species – to care so much about the thoughts and intentions of other people. She says, "People often try to explain the fact that humans are so good at cooperating by saying, well, we needed to cooperate in order to succeed at big game hunting, or so that men in one group could bond with other men to go wipe out the neighboring group. What that doesn't do is explain why these traits emerge so early."
"Michael Tomasello is a developmental psychologist at Duke University and the Max Planck Institute. After a career of comparing cognitive differences between babies and apes, he has found that other apes don't show anywhere near the level of interest in the sharing and cooperative behaviors that emerge so early in humans: "Humans as individuals aren't that much cleverer than other apes. It's the fact that we can put our heads together with others and communicate and collaborate and learn from others and teach others. Human children are adapted for cooperation and shared intentionality in ways that apes aren't."
See:
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsa...hare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social
"Kristen Hawkes is an anthropologist at the University of Utah. She tries to figure out our past by studying modern hunter-gatherers like the Hadza, who likely have lived in the area that is now northern Tanzania for thousands of years. Groups like this are about as close as we can get to seeing how our early human ancestors might have lived."
"They found that the average hunter went out pretty much every day and was successful on exactly 3.4 percent of those excursions. That meant that, in this society at least, the hunting hypothesis seemed way off the mark. If people here were depending on wild meat to survive, they would starve."
"So if dad wasn't bringing home the bacon, who was? After spending a lot of time with the women on their daily foraging trips, the researchers were surprised to discover that the women, both young and old, were providing the majority of calories to their families and group-mates.
Mostly, they were digging tubers, which are deeply buried and hard to extract. The success of a mother at gathering these tubers correlated with the growth of her child. But something else surprising happened once mom had a second baby: That original relationship went away and a new correlation emerged with the amount of food their grandmother was gathering.
Grandmothers were crucial in this environment to childhood survival. So maybe it wasn't an accident that humans are the only great ape species in which women live so long past reproductive age. If having a helpful grandmother increased a kid's chances of survival, natural selection may well have started selecting for older and older women. (This endowment would have passed also to human men.)
A primatologist says, "If young kids were being fed by people besides mom, she thinks that over evolutionary time, this could have led humans to develop the deep social orientation that characterizes our species – to care so much about the thoughts and intentions of other people. She says, "People often try to explain the fact that humans are so good at cooperating by saying, well, we needed to cooperate in order to succeed at big game hunting, or so that men in one group could bond with other men to go wipe out the neighboring group. What that doesn't do is explain why these traits emerge so early."
"Michael Tomasello is a developmental psychologist at Duke University and the Max Planck Institute. After a career of comparing cognitive differences between babies and apes, he has found that other apes don't show anywhere near the level of interest in the sharing and cooperative behaviors that emerge so early in humans: "Humans as individuals aren't that much cleverer than other apes. It's the fact that we can put our heads together with others and communicate and collaborate and learn from others and teach others. Human children are adapted for cooperation and shared intentionality in ways that apes aren't."