Bitch: On the Female of the Species

by Lucy Cooke

In her 2009 book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, Hrdy cites a catalogue of evidence from surviving traditional cultures that suggests our ancestors in the Pleistocene may have had a significant degree of help – from men who thought they just might have been the father, to actual fathers, post-menopausal grandmothers, non-breeding aunts and older children. The help from these allomothers is the reason our species was able to foster big brains yet still proliferate. ‘Human infants are born larger and even more helpless than any of the other apes, and yet when you compare the birth intervals in modern human hunter-gatherers with the birth intervals in any of the other great apes, you find that babies are weaned sooner and their mothers are breeding at a much faster pace than great apes,’ Hrdy has said. 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 human.