The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (35 page)

Those two ultimate causes responsible for the long birth intervals of hunter-gatherers leave open the question of the proximate physiological mechanism ensuring that there are not two children less than several years old to be cared for simultaneously. One mechanism is the resort to neglect or (less often) infanticide, as we have already mentioned: if a hunter-gatherer mother becomes pregnant when her previous child is still less than two and a half years old, then she may neglect or even kill the newborn, knowing that she cannot take care of it as well as of the older child. The other proximate factor is that physiological mechanisms operating in a mother nursing according to the on-demand schedule of frequent feedings characteristic of hunter-gatherer babies (as opposed to the infrequent nursing bouts set for the convenience of the mother in Western society) make it less likely that a nursing mother will become pregnant, even if she resumes sex while nursing.

In hunter-gatherer groups in which nursing has been specifically studied, it is often “on demand.” That is, the infant has constant access to the mother’s breast, is held in contact with the mother during the day, sleeps next to the mother at night, and can nurse at any time it wants, whether
or not the mother is awake. For example, measurements among the !Kung have shown that an infant nurses on the average four times per hour during the day, 2 minutes per nursing bout, with an average interval of only 14 minutes between bouts. The mother wakes to nurse the infant at least twice a night, and the infant nurses without waking the mother several times per night. This constant opportunity for nursing on demand usually continues for at least three years of the !Kung child’s life. In contrast, many or most mothers in modern societies schedule nursing at times when the mother’s activities permit it. The organization of a mother’s work, whether the work is a job outside the house or domestic work within the house, often involves mother-child separations of several hours. The result is many fewer daily nursing bouts than the dozens of bouts for a hunter-gatherer mother, longer individual bouts, and much longer intervals between bouts.

That high nursing frequency of hunter-gatherer mothers has physiological consequences. As mentioned above, nursing hunter-gatherer mothers usually do not conceive for several years after a child’s birth, even if the mother resumes sexual activity. Evidently, something about traditional on-demand nursing acts as a contraceptive. One hypothesis is termed “lactational amenorrhea”: suckling releases maternal hormones that not only stimulate the secretion of milk but that may also inhibit ovulation (a woman’s release of eggs). But that inhibition of ovulation requires a constant regime of frequent nursing; a few bouts of nursing per day do not suffice. The other hypothesis is termed the “critical-fat hypothesis”: ovulation requires that the mother’s fat levels exceed a certain critical threshold. In a nursing woman from a traditional society without abundant food, the high energy costs of milk production keep the mother’s fat level below that critical value. Thus, sexually active nursing mothers in modern Western industrial societies, unlike their hunter-gatherer counterparts, may still conceive (to their surprise) for either or both of two reasons: their nursing frequency is much too low for hormonally induced lactational amenorrhea; and they are sufficiently well nourished that their body fat levels remain above the critical threshold for ovulation, even despite the caloric expenditure of lactation. Many educated Western mothers have heard of lactational amenorrhea, but fewer have heard that it is effective only at high nursing frequencies. A friend of mine who recently,
to her dismay, conceived again only a few months after the birth of her previous child thereby joined the long list of modern women exclaiming, “But I thought that I couldn’t conceive while I was nursing!”

Nursing frequency differs among mammal species. Some mammals, including chimpanzees and most other primate species, bats, and kangaroos, nurse continuously. Other mammals, of which rabbits and antelopes are prime examples, nurse discontinuously: a mother rabbit or antelope leaves her infant hidden in the grass or in a den while she goes out to forage, then she returns after a long interval and suckles the infant only a few times per day. Human hunter-gatherers resemble chimpanzees and Old World monkeys in being continuous nursers. But that pattern, which we inherited from our primate ancestors and presumably maintained for the millions of years of human evolution separate from the evolution of chimpanzees, changed only in the thousands of years since the origins of farming, when we developed lifestyles involving mother-infant separations. Modern human mothers have acquired the suckling habits of rabbits, while retaining the lactational physiology of chimpanzees and monkeys.

Associated with those mammalian species differences in nursing frequency are differences in the percentage of an infant’s time spent in contact with an adult (especially with the mother). In the discontinuously nursing species the infant is in contact with the mother just for brief bouts of nursing and care. In the continuously nursing species the mother carries the infant while she forages: a mother kangaroo keeps the infant in her pouch, a mother bat holds the infant on her stomach even while she is flying, and chimpanzee and Old World monkey mothers carry the infant on their back.

In modern industrial societies today, we follow the rabbit-antelope pattern: the mother or someone else occasionally picks up and holds the infant in order to feed it or play with it, but does not carry the infant constantly; the infant spends much or most of the time during the day in a crib or playpen; and at night the infant sleeps by itself, usually in a separate room from the parents. However, we probably continued to follow our
ancestral ape-monkey model throughout almost all of human history, until within the last few thousand years. Studies of modern hunter-gatherers show that an infant is held almost constantly throughout the day, either by the mother or by someone else. When the mother is walking, the infant is held in carrying devices, such as the slings of the !Kung, string bags in New Guinea, and cradle boards in the north temperate zones. Most hunter-gatherers, especially in mild climates, have constant skin-to-skin contact between the infant and its care-giver. In every known society of human hunter-gatherers and of higher primates, mother and infant sleep immediately nearby, usually in the same bed or on the same mat. A cross-cultural sample of 90 traditional human societies identified not a single one with mother and infant sleeping in separate rooms: that current Western practice is a recent invention responsible for the struggles at putting kids to bed that torment modern Western parents. American pediatricians now recommend not having an infant sleep in the same bed with its parents, because of occasional cases of the infant ending up crushed or else overheating; but virtually all infants in human history until the last few thousand years did sleep in the same bed with the mother and usually also with the father, without widespread reports of the dire consequences feared by pediatricians. That may be because hunter-gatherers sleep on the hard ground or on hard mats; a parent is more likely to roll over onto an infant in our modern soft beds.

For example, !Kung infants spend their first year of life in skin-to-skin contact with the mother or another care-giver for 90% of the time. !Kung infants are carried by the mother wherever she goes, interrupted only when the infant is passed from the mother to other care-givers. A !Kung child begins to separate more frequently from its mother after the age of one and a half, but those separations are initiated almost entirely by the child itself, in order to play with other children. The daily contact time between the !Kung child and care-givers other than the mother exceeds
all
contact time (including contact with the mother) for modern Western children.

One of the commonest Western devices for transporting a child is the stroller, which provides no physical contact between the baby and the care-giver (
Plate 39
). In many strollers, the infant is nearly horizontal, and sometimes facing backwards. Hence the infant does not see the world as
its care-giver sees the world. In recent decades in the United States, devices for transporting children in a vertical (upright) position have been more common, such as baby carriers, backpacks, and chest pouches, but many of those devices have the child facing backwards. In contrast, traditional carrying devices, such as slings or holding a child on one’s shoulders, usually place the child vertically upright, facing forwards, and seeing the same world that the care-giver sees (Plates 21, 38). The constant contact even when the caretaker is walking, the constant sharing of the care-giver’s field of view, and transport in the vertical position may contribute to !Kung infants being advanced (compared to American infants) in some aspects of their neuromotor development.

In warm climates, it is practical to have constant skin-to-skin contact between a naked baby and a mostly naked mother. That is more difficult in cold climates. Hence about half of traditional societies, mostly those in the temperate zones, swaddle their infants, i.e., wrap the infant in warm fabric. The swaddled infant is often strapped to a board called a cradle board. That practice was formerly widespread around the world, mainly in societies at high latitudes. The basic idea of swaddling and of the cradle board is to wrap the baby as protection against the cold, and to restrict the baby’s ability to move its body and limbs. Navajo Indian mothers who use cradle boards explain that the purpose is to induce the child to go to sleep, or to keep the child asleep if the child is put on the cradle board when it is already asleep. The Navajo mother usually adds that the cradle board prevents the infant from suddenly jerking while asleep and thereby waking itself up. A Navajo infant spends 60%–70% of its time on a cradle board for the first six months of life. Cradle boards were formerly also common practice in Europe but began to disappear there a few centuries ago.

To many of us moderns, the idea of a cradle board or swaddling is abhorrent—or was, until swaddling recently came back into vogue. The notion of personal freedom means a lot to us, and a cradle board or swaddling undoubtedly does restrict an infant’s personal freedom. We are prone to assume that cradle boards or swaddling retard a child’s development and inflict lasting psychological damage. In fact, there are no personality or motor differences, or differences in age of independent walking, between Navajo children who were or were not kept on a cradle board, or between cradle-boarded Navajo children and nearby
Anglo-American children. The probable explanation is that, by the age that an infant starts to crawl, the infant is spending half of its day off of the cradle board anyway, and most of the time that it spends on the cradle board is when the infant is asleep. Actually, immobilizing an infant on a cradle board lets the infant be kept near its mother, and taken with the mother when she goes anywhere. Hence it is argued that doing away with cradle boards brings no real advantages in freedom, stimulation, or neuromotor development. Typical Western children sleeping in separate rooms, transported in baby carriages, and left in cribs during the day are often socially more isolated than are cradle-boarded Navajo children.

The investment of fathers in caring for their offspring varies greatly among animal species. At one extreme are some species, such as ostriches and sea horses, in which, after a male has fertilized a female and the female has produced eggs, the female goes off and leaves brooding of the eggs and care for the hatched offspring entirely to the father. At the opposite extreme are many species of mammals and some birds: after the male fertilizes the female, the male deserts her to pursue other females, and the entire burden of parenting falls upon the female. Most species of monkeys and apes fall between these two extremes but nearer the latter one: the father lives with the mother and her offspring, perhaps as part of a larger troop, but provides the offspring with little other than protection.

In humans, paternal care is low by the standards of ostriches, high by the standards of apes and most other primate species, but the father’s involvement in the care of infants is less than that of the mother in all known human societies. Nevertheless, fathers play a significant role in food provisioning, protection, and education in most human societies, with the result that the death of a child’s biological father decreases a child’s probability of surviving in some societies. Fathers’ involvement tends to be greater for older children (especially for sons) than for infants, and fathers in modern societies usually succeed in delegating many aspects of child care, such as changing diapers, wiping bottoms and noses, and bathing a child.

Among human societies, there is much variation in that involvement of fathers, partly related to a society’s subsistence ecology. Paternal involvement is highest in societies in which women spend time obtaining most of the food. For instance, Aka Pygmy fathers furnish more direct care to their infants than do the fathers of any other studied human population (
Plate 8
), perhaps related to the fact that Aka Pygmy mothers not only gather plant foods but also participate in hunting with nets. On the average, child care by fathers, and also women’s contribution to the food supply, are higher in societies of hunter-gatherers than in societies of herders. Fathers’ direct care of their children tends to be low in societies, such as those of New Guinea Highlanders and African Bantu groups, in which the men devote much of their time and identity to being warriors, and to protecting their family against aggressive other men. In much of the New Guinea Highlands, men traditionally even lived in separate communal men’s houses, together with their sons after the age of six, while each wife lived in a separate hut with her daughters and young sons. The men and boys ate by themselves, consuming food that a man’s wife and a boy’s mother brought to the men’s house.

What about the child-rearing contribution of care-givers other than the mother and the father? In modern Western society, a child’s parents are typically by far its dominant care-givers. The role of “allo-parents”—i.e., individuals who are not the biological parents but who do some care-giving—has even been decreasing in recent decades, as families move more often and over longer distances, and children no longer have the former constant availability of grandparents and aunts and uncles living nearby. This is of course not to deny that babysitters, schoolteachers, grandparents, and older siblings may also be significant care-givers and influences. But allo-parenting is much more important, and parents play a less dominant role, in traditional societies.