FATHER TIME

A revolutionary look at the "mother" in men.

Hrdy is the visionary anthropologist who, with colleagues, discovered the importance of allomothering (co-parenting by groups other than the mother) to the evolution of big-brained humans. Our brains are so complex that they need years to fully mature, which could have slowed Homo sapiens’ population growth and led to extinction. However, with allomothers—often, menopausal women with time to help raise children—primary mothers could produce more children faster, ensuring survival. The work rocked anthropology, but Hrdy wasn’t done. Recently, watching her son-in-law take exquisite care of his infant, she began to wonder if she needed to redefine the term allomother. She tested her saliva, and that of her husband, for the nurturing hormone oxytocin before and during a period when they cradled their grandchild. Her oxytocin rose significantly. The shocker: Her husband’s oxytocin levels rose slowly at first, but within hours, matched hers. Soon after, the author discovered that tests for nurturing hormones, from estrogen to prolactin, delivered similar results in many men worldwide after prolonged exposure to babies. Are men as endocrinologically transformed and neurologically transformed, in both frontal cortex and evolutionarily ancient brain areas, as women by prolonged close proximity to babies? If so, does this mean men can “mother”—biologically—as well as women? Hrdy plunged into research, taking her from current labs and hunter-gathering groups back to the Pleistocene. She found the answer was, very likely, yes and yes. Together with that earlier work, Hrdy has now gone a long way to persuasively argue that humans, female and male, are more communal than competitive and that this quality, more than any other, has led to our primacy in the animal kingdom.

A mesmerizing, masterfully written book on the transformative power of human parenting.