An orangutan mother gets no help and as a result can only afford to have a baby every seven to eight years. By contrast the interbirth interval for a human hunter-gatherer is just two to three years. Hrdy goes on to argue that this shared guardianship favoured offspring that were good at soliciting care, thereby promoting the evolution of our unique capacity for empathy, cooperation and understanding the minds of others. In Hrdy’s version of human evolution it is sharing the caring load, not hunting and warfare, that shaped the collaborative might and brainpower of the emotionally modern
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