Mamels life animal

Kristen Hawkes and Wenda Trevathan have organized an incredible symposium "Birth to Grandmotherhood: Childrearing in Human Evolution" at the  Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA) next month.   Sarah Hrdy , Kim Bard , Sue Carter , Barry Hewlett , Hilly Kaplan , and Melvin Konner !   Luckily for me, I will be so riveted by all the other speakers I won't have the chance to get nervous about my talk. The talks are Friday afternoon, February 21st, 2014.  Admission is free for this event, but registration is required for each person who will attend. Click here to register & for more information . Best of all, if you can't attend in person, there will be a Live Symposium Webcast (which also requires online registration ).

Greetings from Namibia! Prof. Brooke Scelza , Department of Anthropology, UCLA and I just spent the last few weeks conducting research among the Himba people of Northwestern Namibia.  This has been a long-planned collaboration between Brooke and myself and it was fantastic to finally get the project well and truly launched. Integrating methods from human behavioral ecology, ethnography, and lactation biology we were able to investigate numerous aspects of breastfeeding and breastmilk among traditionally living pastoralists.  Although bold claims and righteous results await lab assays and data analysis, here is a photo essay that captures some of what we were doing. Himba Woman & Infant photo by me! Driving from Windhoek to Kaokoland took a couple of days during which we saw baboons, giraffes, warthogs, and duikers just  chillin' roadside . Driving on the right side on the left side  (of the car, of the road) W e worked in the shadow of Omuhonga,  near the town of Okongwa

In March, Nicholas Day at SLATE wrote a column about the science of breastmilk , showcasing the emerging perspective that “Milk is food; Milk is Medicine; and Milk is Signal.” People seemed particularly intrigued by the hormonal ‘Milk is Signal’ aspect of mother’s milk, although it’s the least understood. Sidebar: Why don't more kid costumes come in adult sizes.  Seriously. Recently, Skip Bartol and colleagues coined the term “lactocrine programming” to describe the process by which hormones present in mother’s milk permanently shape physiological processes within in the young (Bartol et al. 2009). A growing body of evidence has demonstrated that hormones from the mother, ingested through milk, bind to receptors within the young. Once these “maternal-origin” hormones bind, they seemingly trigger hormonal signaling cascades as would the young’s own hormones. Previously I described that hormones present in milk-specifically adiponectin - are associated with infant growth althou