Harsh environments promote alloparental care across human societies.

ABSTRACT: Alloparental care is central to human life history, which integrates exceptionally short interbirth intervals and large birth size with an extended period of juvenile dependency and increased longevity. Formal models, previous comparative research, and palaeoanthropological evidence suggest that humans evolved higher levels of cooperative childcare in response to increasingly harsh environments. Although this hypothesis remains difficult to test directly, the relative importance of alloparental care varies across human societies, providing an opportunity to assess how local social and ecological factors influence the expression of this behaviour. We therefore, investigated associations between alloparental infant care and socioecology across 141 non-industrialized societies. We predicted i

SUBMITTER: Martin JS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7482265 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature