Father Time

Starred review from March 25, 2024
Hrdy (The Woman That Never Evolved), an anthropology professor emerita at the University of California Davis, provides an outstanding examination of the history and science of fatherhood. For insight into the evolution of human paternity, Hrdy studies primate fathers, noting that while male chimpanzees brutally murder any baby they didn’t sire, owl monkeys will nurture other males’ infants as if they were their own. Crediting the evolutionary success of early humans to their communal social arrangements, Hrdy cites studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer groups that indicate prehistorical men, though able to take down big game, remained dependent on caloric plants gathered by women. Mutually beneficial gender roles emerged in which men provided protein for the community’s children in exchange for access to foraged tubers and nuts. Tracing the development of fatherhood through the modern era, Hrdy contends that the rise of agriculture and livestock privileged the status of aggressive men who defended their property, producing patriarchal societies that only in the past several decades have started trending toward more equitable divisions of child-rearing. Revelatory scientific studies shedding light on men’s biological proclivity for caring (close association with a newborn has been found to produce in men the same elevated levels of oxytocin seen in women) complement the edifying history. It amounts to an invaluable deep history of dads.

Starred review from July 15, 2024
A revolutionary look at the "mother" in men. Hrdy is the visionary anthropologist who, with colleagues, discovered the importance of allomothering (co-parenting by groups other than the mother) to the evolution of big-brained humans. Our brains are so complex that they need years to fully mature, which could have slowedHomo sapiens' population growth and led to extinction. However, with allomothers--often, menopausal women with time to help raise children--primary mothers could produce more children faster, ensuring survival. The work rocked anthropology, but Hrdy wasn't done. Recently, watching her son-in-law take exquisite care of his infant, she began to wonder if she needed to redefine the termallomother. She tested her saliva, and that of her husband, for the nurturing hormone oxytocin before and during a period when they cradled their grandchild. Her oxytocin rose significantly. The shocker: Her husband's oxytocin levels rose slowly at first, but within hours, matched hers. Soon after, the author discovered that tests for nurturing hormones, from estrogen to prolactin, delivered similar results in many men worldwide after prolonged exposure to babies. Are men as endocrinologically transformed and neurologically transformed, in both frontal cortex and evolutionarily ancient brain areas, as women by prolonged close proximity to babies? If so, does this mean men can "mother"--biologically--as well as women? Hrdy plunged into research, taking her from current labs and hunter-gathering groups back to the Pleistocene. She found the answer was, very likely, yes and yes. Together with that earlier work, Hrdy has now gone a long way to persuasively argue that humans, femaleand male, are more communal than competitive and that this quality, more than any other, has led to our primacy in the animal kingdom. A mesmerizing, masterfully written book on the transformative power of human parenting.

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