Chapter 1: Ancestral Landscapes: Children’s development in light of evolution and culture

Culture: socially transmitted and shared beliefs, understandings, and practices. Importance of culture in understanding adaptiveness – if a culture encourages psychological distance, as some do, then avoidant attachment (often regarded as “maladaptive” in Western context) is “normal” in that culture

Issues addressed in the book

• Is there an optimal range of infant and childhood care and what might that look like? (note: range based on an evolutionary understanding).

• Have some societies stepped outside of that optimal range and what effects might this have? (does the prevalence of neglect, abuse, etc, suggest an out-of-range context?)

• Optimal range, or base-line developmental context, must be discerned by examining the ancestral context of development. What was the developmental context into which humans evolved?

• One must mindful not to oversimplify the ancestral context (it may have varied by place and time) nor to try naively impose it today. What was adaptive then, may not be now.

Hunter-gatherer past: way of life practiced by humans and hominins up to about 10,000 ybp (advent of settled agriculture)

• Two types: non-egalitarian – more settled; movable villages; more “private” ownership of land/resources. able to procure surplus food and other resources. More stratified societies (elites who control surplus, workers who procure and process resources). Ex: Northwest Native Americans who procure and process large quantities of salmon, seal, or whale.

• Egalitarian: smaller family-base bands connected to larger kin-based superbands. However, non-kin also widely present in groups. Only own what you can carry. More frequent movement, use resources until exhausted, move on. Aggressively egalitarian. Thought to be more representative of ancestral past.

Egalitarian or Nomadic Hunter-gatherers

• Common characteristics of egalitarian h-gs• 20-50 counting children• Build temporary hunts, living sites as they go• Sharing of resources, widely-shared intimacy• Highly cooperative – hunting, gathering, childrearing

Common characteristics of childrearing

EDN: evolved developmental niche• Common to social mammals, probably

emerged about 30 mya• Still present in many ways for humans

(especially humans in traditional societies)

• Natural childbirth• Frequent infant-initiated breastfeeding• Continuous contact/proximity to

caregiver• Free play in nature with different aged

playmates• Alloparenting

Modern Childrearing

Reasons to suspect that deviations from EDN could have detrimental effects on development:

• Significant effects on brain development when breastfeeding does not occur in first months of life.

• SIDs appears to be associated with deviations from EDN in sleeping/residency patterns (sleeping on stomach in separate room).

• Though H-gs often experience physical and ecological hardship they frequently have greater social/emotional well-being compared to moderns, and this impacts childrearing and development.