" This book] brings together high-quality papers from many
different fields: endocrinology, evolutionary biology, demography,
economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology... It can be seen as
a practical tool for researchers in the field, and it provides a
large amount of data across a wide range of populations and helps
to find a common ground between theories emerging from different
fields. It is the kind of book that will never end up in the last
dusty row of your shelves because you will continually refer to it,
picking up here and there empirical and theoretical data for the
next decades." BioOne. Research Evolved
From a comparative perspective, human life histories are unique
and raising offspring is unusually costly: humans have relatively
short birth intervals compared to other apes, childhood is long,
mothers care simultaneously for many dependent children (other apes
raise one offspring at a time), infant mortality is high in natural
fertility/mortality populations, and human females have a long
post-reproductive lifespan. These features conspire to make child
raising very burdensome. Mothers frequently defray these costs with
paternal help (not usual in other ape species), although this
contribution is not always enough. Grandmothers, elder siblings,
paid allocarers, or society as a whole, help to defray the costs of
childcare, both in our evolutionary past and now. Studying
offspring care in a various human societies, and other mammalian
species, a wide range of specialists such as anthropologists,
psychologists, animal behaviorists, evolutionary ecologists,
economists and sociologists, have contributed to this volume,
offering new insights into and a better understanding of one of the
key areas of human society.
Gillian Bentley is a biological anthropologist and reproductive
ecologist and a Royal Society Research Fellow at University College
London. Her prior work focused on explaining why different human
populations occupying a range of environments have varying levels
of reproductive hormones. She now directs projects that interface
with reproduction and reproductive health, working with the migrant
Bangladeshi community in London. Recent publications include
"Infertility in the Modern World: Present and Future Prospects, "
edited with C.G.N. Mascie-Taylor (Cambridge University Press,
2000).
Ruth Mace is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at
University College London. She works on the evolutionary ecology of
social and subsistence systems. Particular interests include
parental investment, mainly in African populations but also in the
UK, and also macro-evolutionary studies on the evolution of
cultural diversity. Recent publications include "The Evolution of
Cultural Diversity: A Phylogenetic Approach, " edited with C.
Holden and S. Shennan (UCL Press, 2005).
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