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Showing posts with the label Cooperation

No Country for Colostrum

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In the first hours and days after a human baby is born, mothers aren’t producing the white biofluid that typically comes to mind when we think about milk. They synthesize a yellowish milk known as colostrum or “pre-milk.” Colostrum is the first substance human infants are adapted to consume, and despite being low in fat, colostrum plays many roles in the developing neonate (1). Historically and cross-culturally, colostrum was viewed very differently than it is amongst industrialized populations today. Colossus Colostrum A colossus is not just something large, it can be “something of great power, influence, or importance.” Colostrum, the smallest drops for the tiniest tummies, effectively fits this definition because of its substantial effects on organizing the infant’s health, metabolism, and microbiome. At birth, babies are first appreciably exposed to maternal and environmental microbes while they have relatively naïve and immature immune systems.  During this neonatal per

Cooperative Infant Care and Human Evolution

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No mother does it alone. Well, no human mother.    An important difference between humans and other apes is that women simply can not raise their young without help.  As infants, we have to grow bigger brains and yet our mothers wean us at younger ages .  Fossils of early human ancestors show that relative brain size was beginning to get larger by about 1.8 million years ago, suggesting that the at this point mothers likely needed help.  Who was helping? "Mother and Child" by John Henry Twatchman, 1893 In the 1960s, many scholars proposed “Man the Hunter.”  Males, by providing nutrient rich meat to their mates, were the obvious critical factor in shaping human evolution (Lee and DeVore 1969). The assumed importance of the human male-female bond for infant rearing and lifetime reproductive success inspired decades of social and evolutionary psychology research on human mating behavior. Picking mates, attracting mates, and guarding mates was of paramount importance for humans b