Stone Age babies had better parenting than today! Research shows that babies received care for nine hours a day from up to fifteen different caregivers
Modern life may have made many things easier, but scientists say raising a child isn’t one of them.
A study of modern hunter-gatherer groups suggests that our Stone Age ancestors provided their children with better childcare than we do today.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge found that children from the Mbendjele BaYaka in the Republic of Congo received nine hours of care a day from up to fifteen different caregivers.
Crying children were cared for more than half of the time by the mother’s support network, giving mothers more time to rest.
The study authors say these findings suggest that modern parenting methods may conflict with children’s evolutionarily programmed needs.
Scientists suggest that children in Stone Age hunter-gatherer groups may have had better childcare than modern children
The study’s authors argue that mothers in the West have faced no such pressure and little support for most of humanity’s evolutionary history (stock image)
Dr. Nikhil Chaudhary, lead author of the study, says insights into these modern hunter-gatherers can tell us more about how people lived in the Stone Age.
“We lived as hunter-gatherers for more than 95 percent of our evolutionary history,” says Dr. Chaudhary.
‘Therefore, contemporary hunter-gatherer societies may provide clues as to whether certain parenting systems exist to which infants and their mothers can be psychologically adapted.’
The Mbendjele BaYaka live in the jungles of the north of the Republic of Congo, where their livelihood depends on hunting, fishing, gathering and collecting honey.
Evolutionary anthropologists stayed at the Mbendjele BaYaka between March and July 2014.
The Mbendjele BaYaka live in the northern jungles of the Republic of Congo and depend on hunting, fishing, gathering and collecting honey
During these months, researchers observed children for 12 hours of daylight and recorded how often they were cared for and by whom.
The researchers found that between 10 and 20 different caregivers would be involved in a child’s care and that a mother’s support system would respond to more than half of their baby’s cries.
Children were almost never left alone and spent long periods in physical contact with adults or received intensive care.
When children cried, they were helped within 10 seconds in half of the cases and within 25 seconds in 90 percent of the cases.
Children in hunter-gatherer societies, as in the Stone Age, were rarely left alone and received constant care from a wide range of different caregivers, including older children
Older babies and adolescents will also often be involved in care, which the report’s authors say gives them experience and helps reduce anxiety around parenthood.
This suggests that children may be evolutionarily primed to expect high levels of attention and physical contact from different caregivers.
However, in Western countries, the supply of high-quality child benefits is limited and the ratios between children and caregivers are high.
Dr. Chaudhary says: ‘The nuclear family system in the West is a world away from the communal living conditions of hunter-gatherer societies such as the Mbendjele.
‘Childcare is finally becoming a priority in the government budget, but there is still much more to do.
“As a society, from policymakers to employers to health care services, we must work together to ensure mothers and children get the support and care they need to thrive.”
In the study, Dr. Chaudhary and his co-authors write, “Parent manuals that expect infants to play alone for extended periods of time or be deprived of physical contact may conflict with children’s psychobiological expectations.”
This graph shows the complex care relationships between caregivers (gray circles), children under the age of one and a half (blue circles) and children under the age of four (green circles).
The study also notes that Stone Age societies might have better prioritized giving mothers rest.
In Western societies, the authors write, it is common for childcare to be used only to give parents time to go to work, rather than time for themselves.
This means that parents have no time to rest or recover, in total contrast to the parenting practices of hunter-gatherers and our Neolithic ancestors.
They claim that never in all of human history have parents been under such intense pressure and faced such a lack of support.
Co-author and child psychologist Dr Annie Swanepoel says that ‘support for mothers also has numerous benefits for children, such as reducing the risk of neglect and abuse, buffering against family adversity and improving maternal well-being , which in turn improves maternal care.”
The study was published in the journal Developmental Psychology.
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE HISTORY OF THE STONE AGE?
The Stone Age is a period in human prehistory distinguished by the original development of stone tools and comprising more than 95 percent of human technological prehistory.
It begins with the earliest known use of stone tools by hominins, ancient ancestors of humans, during the Old Stone Age – about 3.3 million years ago.
Between about 400,000 and 200,000 years ago, the pace of innovation in stone technology began to accelerate very slightly, a period known as the Middle Stone Age.
At the beginning of this time, hand axes were made with exquisite craftsmanship. This eventually gave way to smaller, more diverse toolkits, with an emphasis on individual tools rather than larger core tools.
The Stone Age is a period in human prehistory distinguished by the original development of stone tools and comprising more than 95 percent of human technological prehistory. This image shows Neolithic jadeite axes from the Museum of Toulouse
These toolkits were dated at least 285,000 years ago in some parts of Africa, and between 250,000 and 200,000 years ago in Europe and parts of western Asia. These toolkits last at least 50,000 to 28,000 years ago.
During the Later Stone Age, the pace of innovation increased and the level of craftsmanship increased.
Groups of Homo sapiens experimented with various raw materials, including bone, ivory and antler, but also stone.
The period, between 50,000 and 39,000 years ago, is also associated with the emergence of modern human behavior in Africa.
Different groups sought their own distinct cultural identities and adopted their own ways of making things.
Later Stone Age peoples and their technologies spread from Africa over the following thousands of years.