Unique to most mammals, primates are known to be extremely caring and warm to their offspring. Their parenting styles and child development processes are parallel to any hominid. The mother is the main benefactor of the care, but she is often supported by the father as well. One of the reasons primates are smarter than other mammals is because of the prolonged care the parents provide for fewer offspring. Since their dedication is more concentrated on fewer offspring they develop more socially complex manners. The development of their social complexity also calls for a longer development period. “By caring for their offspring, providing them with food, and teaching them about social roles and social behavior generally, primates increase the chances of their species’ survival.”
Primates also have relatively longer periods of birth because of the lengthier development processes and the attentiveness that goes into them by the parents. Primates also tend to live in groups which consist of several mothers but fewer fathers who usually have more mates than the females do. The mothers are supportive of each other in order to provide nutritional needs to the young. This is very similar to a human commune where everyone, whether they are blood related or not, take care of one another.
For the entire species, normally the sex with the greater rate of reproduction invests more into mating rather than parenting, while the sex with the worse rate of reproduction invests more into parental effort/child development than in the mating effort. This is because, according to Clutton-Brock, “following mating, members of the sex with the higher potential rate of reproduction can rejoin the mating pool more quickly than can members of the opposite sex, and it is often in their reproductive best interest to do so, particularly when biparental care is not necessary for the viability of offspring.”
Owen Lovejoy, an American anthropologist, was the one to suggest a correlation of female and male body sizes to their suggested behaviors. Because of Lovejoy’s hypothesis, researchers believed, for a long time, that the early male hominids were extremely competitive in terms of mating because they were highly dimorphic and that they did not participate in caring for the offspring. Nevertheless if they were not especially dimorphic then the male competition for mates was probably not part of the early hominid behavior.
Philip Reno, another American anthropologist, and his associates have studied early hominid bones and determined that “Relatively little sexual dimorphism in the body size suggests that males were cooperative, not competitive. This cooperative behavior could have included pair bonding –one female with one male-a behavior pattern necessary for the kind of provisioning for Lovejoy’s hypothesis.”
Our group agrees that cooperative behavior as opposed to competition seems to be the key that sets apart from the rest of the mammal kingdom when it comes to parenting and in all aspects of human behavior. With cooperation whole civilizations are built and ground-breaking discoveries are made. When it is disturbed, than less advancements are made. Cooperation is key especially when it comes to such a vital thing as a raising as raising a child.
For more reading see:
Flinn, Mark. "Evolution of Human Parental Behavior and the Human Family." PARENTING: SCIENCE AND PRACTICE. 1.1&2 (2001): 14-32. Print/Internet.
Larsen, Clark Spencer. Our Origins. Ed. Pete Lesser. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc. , 2008. Print.
