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 ).

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