Book of the week: Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Sociobiologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's “paradigm-shifting" book traces the evolution of group trust and communication among humans to the social cohesion needed by women to raise their babies.

(Harvard, 422 pages, $29.95)

The evolutionary significance of warfare is overrated, says sociobiologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. What made us human—what transformed our ancestors into a uniquely cooperative, hypersocial species of great ape—were not the requirements of inter-tribal combat, as some anthropologists have long contended, but the demands of motherhood. For most of human history, says Hrdy, our population was so small and spread out that there was no reason to fight over survival needs. But human infants’ large, slowly maturing brains and need for large amounts of protein make them uniquely dependent, and mothers found they needed help from other women to raise their babies. That led to the development of group trust and communication not found in our simian relatives. So take a bow, grandmothers, aunts, and other female caregivers, says Hrdy. You enabled humans to conquer the world.

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