Substitute Parents: Biological and Social Perspectives on Alloparenting in Human Societies (Studies of the Biosocial Society Book 3) – Gillian Bentley Lage Kosten

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 t…