The American anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy holds, in Mothers and Others (2009), that humans are ‘cooperative breeders’: unlike the other great apes, human mothers have always shared the care of their babies with others, such as grandmothers, older children, fathers and the wider group. She thinks this shared care, and the need it gave babies to read and win over many carers, is what made humans so good at understanding each other. Therapeutic Shamanism teaches the same picture of the past from its side, in which children in hunter-gatherer tribes were raised by the whole tribe, and the isolated nuclear family is a recent invention.
Who is Sarah Blaffer Hrdy? #
An American anthropologist and primatologist, born in Dallas in 1946, who took her doctorate at Harvard in 1975 and taught at the University of California, Davis, where she is now professor emerita. Her first fieldwork, at Mount Abu in India, was on infanticide amongst Hanuman langur monkeys, published as The Langurs of Abu (1977). Her later books include The Woman That Never Evolved (1981), Mother Nature (1999), Mothers and Others (2009) and Father Time (2024), and she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1990.1
What did she mean by “mothers and others”? #
That a human baby has never been raised by its mother alone. Amongst our closest relatives the pattern is the opposite. A wild chimpanzee, gorilla or orangutan mother keeps her baby in front-to-front contact day and night, and the earliest a wild chimpanzee mother has been seen to let anyone else take her baby is at three and a half months.2 Human mothers hand their newborns round almost from the start. Amongst the Hadza, hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, newborns are held by someone other than their mother about 85 per cent of the time in the first days of life, by grandmothers, great-aunts, older siblings, fathers and even visitors. Amongst the Efe of the Central African forest, foragers who also trade and work with neighbouring farmers, babies average fourteen different caretakers in their first days.2
Hrdy calls these other carers alloparents (‘other parents’) or allomothers, and the arrangement cooperative breeding, a term from the study of birds and other animals in which group members help raise young that are not their own. Her claim is that humans are cooperative breeders by nature, and that this, more than hunting, tools or language, is what set our ancestors apart.3 Human children are hugely expensive and slow to grow up, and yet human mothers have their babies closer together than other great apes do, every three or four years against as much as eight for an orangutan. Without help, she thinks, they could not have managed it.
Why does shared care matter so much? #
Because, in Hrdy’s account, it is where our ability to understand each other comes from. A chimpanzee baby can count on one carer. A human baby, cared for by several people whose commitment varies, has to monitor faces, read intentions and draw people in, and so babies who were good at it fared better. Over a very long time, in her view, this shaped a species unusually interested in what others think and feel, so that “emotional modernity” came before the anatomy and culture we usually take as the mark of modern humans.4
She makes the point with an image. Hundreds of strangers can sit crammed together on a long flight, put up with each other, and even help each other, and we take that for granted. Imagine the same flight full of chimpanzees, she says, and it would be a very different journey. Our tolerance of each other is not automatic; it is the residue of a particular way of raising children, repeated over hundreds of thousands of years.4
Who were the “others”? #
Whoever was there and willing. Grandmothers loom large in her account, drawing on studies of hard-working Hadza grandmothers whose foraging kept their grandchildren fed, but so do older sisters and brothers, aunts, fathers and other men, and the wider band.5 Hrdy also disagrees with John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, on one point, the assumption that continuous care by the mother alone is the normal pattern for primates and early humans. In her view Bowlby took the wrong apes as his model; for humans, the norm is a secure bond with the mother set inside a web of other trusted carers.5
How does this relate to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
It describes from evolutionary biology the same picture of the past that Therapeutic Shamanism teaches about tribe. Hunter-gatherer tribes were very rarely made up of nuclear family units. Children were usually raised by all of the adults in a tribe, not just by their biological parents, and a child was free to spend time with whichever adults they felt closest to; the biological link still mattered and was honoured, but in a different context. In many tribes the whole group slept together.6 The nuclear family, by contrast, is a recent invention, at most a few hundred years old, a tiny fraction of human history, and already looking like a failed experiment.7 Hunter-gatherer child-rearing kept children close and responded quickly to their emotional needs, and anthropologists from all over the world have described hunter-gatherer children as unusually happy and well adjusted, unusual, that is, compared with ours.8
Hrdy’s work also offers a kinder way to see what has gone wrong since. As humans, our survival as babies depends on finding someone to act as a mother to us, so that need is hardwired into us.9 If human mothers were never meant to do it alone, then much of the shortfall in mothering today is not simply the failure of individual mothers, but of a way of life that took the other carers away. That fits the Therapeutic Shamanism view that abuse and neglect are endemic in Taker culture and passed down the generations, so that parents raise their children as they were raised, not out of malice but because they know no better.8 Looking to our hunter-gatherer ancestors gives both a healthy standard to measure childhoods against and a template for remodelling them.9 See What are the Mother-Wound and the Father-Wound? and What is the “evolved nest”?
Does this mean early humans were simply gentler? #
Hrdy is careful not to say so. For her, cooperative breeding is a strategy that paid off, not a sign that our ancestors were nicer by nature, and her book includes hard cases: a coalition of wild chimpanzee females in the Budongo Forest attacking a newly arrived mother and killing her baby, and, in a large breeding colony of cotton-top tamarins, mothers abandoning or rejecting their babies far more often when they were short of helpers, about 57 per cent of the time against 12 per cent with help.10 She ends on a warning, not a celebration. The conditions that made humans capable of mutual understanding are not guaranteed, and if children are raised without enough responsive carers, the capacities that depended on them may not hold.
Therapeutic Shamanism also does not ask anyone to copy hunter-gatherer families. Its point is that modern people tend to carry the nuclear family into their picture of tribe, and that seeing how differently children were raised helps us find our way back to a saner way of living together, not to go back. See What was hunter-gatherer life really like?
Is Hrdy’s idea disputed? #
Partly. That human mothers share care with others, and that grandmothers and other helpers make a difference to children’s survival, is widely accepted. What is debated is her further claim, that cooperative breeding drove the evolution of human social intelligence. In 2015 the zoologists Alex Thornton and Katherine McAuliffe, reviewing the evidence across species, found little sign that cooperatively breeding animals are cleverer or have bigger brains, and in primates the data point the other way.11
On the other side, the primatologists Judith Burkart and Carel van Schaik, who had developed the idea with Hrdy, replied with a revised version, in which shared care eases the social and energetic limits that otherwise stop a big-brained, slow-growing species from evolving at all. The critics answered again in 2016 that the revised version is too vague to test, and the question remains open.11
