The Lawrence Jacobsen Library
P-S/PrimateLit Review Books

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer.
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

MOTHERS AND OTHERS: THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

In the view of primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many other in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine. –Natalie Angier, New York Times (3 March 2009).

ABOUT THE BOOK

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: 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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at University of California-Davis. More about Sarah Hrdy can be found at www.citrona.com/sarah-bhrdy.htm.

CONTENTS

1. Apes on a Plane

2. Why Us and Not Them?

3. Why It Takes a Village

4. Novel Developments

5. Will the Real Pleistocene Family Please Step Forward?

6. Meet the Alloparents

7. Babies as Sensory Traps

8. Grandmothers among Others

9. Childhood and the Descent of Man

Notes
References
Acknowledgments
Index

WHERE TO ORDER

ISBN 978-0-674-03299-6 (Hardcover) $29.95
Harvard University Press
79 Garden St.
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Tel: 617-496-1340
Fax: 617-349-5244
Website: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/index.html
Link to order online: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/HRDMOT.html

Posted Date: 2009-04-02

URL: http://library.primate.wisc.edu/collections/books/index.php
File last modified: September 29, 2009