Prehistoric Dads Helped With Child Care
Hands-on fathers may have helped jumpstart the modern human population
The males among our earliest human ancestors may have helped jumpstart the modern human population explosion by helping females with child rearing. This paternal investment resembled the kind of hands-on parenting many dads still display, Northwestern University researcher Lee T. Gettler suggests in a new anthropological model of human evolution. As there are in the modern era, there were some deadbeat dads who didn't lend a hand with child care in the distant past.MSNBC article: click here
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The study was published in the February issue of the journal American Anthropologist. Dads in early human species would have aided in carrying children, as well as in their bathing, feeding, playing and teaching them the lessons of prehistoric life, says Gettler. They traded these services with the females for access to mating, allowing for monogamy and the modern family structure to develop.
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Evolutionary biologist and biological anthropologist John Tooby of University of California at Santa Barbara agrees that fatherly care played a decisive role in human evolution. Yet Tooby, who is unaffiliated with Gettler's study, sees paternal investment impacting human dominance as a species not only because humans were able to reproduce more frequently, but because the additional care allowed us to develop better brains.
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