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

I am currently polishing a manuscript for submission (hence the obvious necessity of working on a blog post, next I will clean my bathroom tile). Delving deep into the literature to precisely contextualize my results, I despair that I will never be able to read ALL the things. For example, entering two key search terms- ‘lactation’ and ‘glucocorticoids’- returns 24,800  results in Google Scholar . John Medbury (LAZY J Studios) Reading all that is just not going to happen. Merely identifying the most pertinent papers can be challenging. And with every new literature search, I discover articles that I clearly should have read ages ago. Um especially when I was writing this .  I had that sinking feeling yesterday as I read a killer review.  In the text the authors described an exciting dynamic; high food intake, high cortisol concentrations in mother’s milk, and high activity in kittens covary while low food intake, low cortisol concentrations in mother’s milk, and low activity in kitten

Are you an anthropologist? Are you going to be in Chicago for the meetings in a couple weeks? Love lactation research?  And most importantly, do you like getting up super early in the morning? MOTHERS, MILKS, AND MEANING: INNOVATIONS IN STUDYING LACTATION, INFANT FEEDING, AND DEVELOPMENTAL ECOLOGY in HUMANS AND NONHUMAN PRIMATES Thursday, November 21, 2013: 8:00 AM-11:45 AM Barbershop (Renaissance Blackstone Hotel) From the abstract : “The goal of this panel is to bring together a range of anthropologists specializing in human and non-human primate lactation and breastfeeding to bridge this gap and explore the biological, sociocultural and structural concepts that characterize infant and juvenile feeding among humans and primates. This panel serves as an opportunity for the exchange of new ideas and novel methodology, while facilitating an increased understanding of how physiology, behavior, and social practices are reshaping our understanding of milk and breastfeeding and