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Cultural Evolution and Human Reproductive Behavior

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Building Babies

Part of the book series: Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects ((DIPR,volume 37))

Abstract

There is much that is “typically ape” about the way humans go about living their lives and building their babies (e.g., Chapais 2008; Smith and Tompkins 1995). Among mammals, apes and humans are characterized by low lifetime fertility, a slow pace of reproduction, and a large investment in each offspring. Many of the differences between apes and humans can be considered differences of degree and not kind. For example, like other apes, humans have a large brain in comparison to our body size. The human brain is extreme, however, being about three times the size of the chimpanzee brain. Since brain tissue is “expensive” to maintain and build (Aiello and Wheeler 1995; Isler and Van Schaik 2009a), humans have an even bigger problem providing our developing babies with sufficient nutrition. Much of what is not typically ape about humans is a consequence of the fact that human populations share a complex culture. In this chapter, I will describe the role of culture in human reproduction and suggest how the motivations and abilities that maintain culture could have coevolved with human life history and parenting behavior.

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  1. Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, 210 Full Circle, Davis, CA, USA

    Lesley Newson

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, 109 Davenport Hall, M/C 148, Urbana, 61801, Illinois, USA

    Kathryn B.H. Clancy

  2. , Department of HUman Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 11 Divinity Ave, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    Katie Hinde

  3. , Comparative Primate Biology Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, 60612, Illinois, USA

    Julienne N. Rutherford

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Newson, L. (2013). Cultural Evolution and Human Reproductive Behavior. In: Clancy, K., Hinde, K., Rutherford, J. (eds) Building Babies. Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects, vol 37. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4060-4_21

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