ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the extensive literature on "cooperative breeding" in animals to explore the ways that cooperative child childrearing might have transformed the social and ecological context in which early hominid infants developed. It examines how human infant’s need to elicit and maintain succor affected the evolution of specific human cognitive and emotional capacities. The chapter discusses a cooperative breeding model that provide a more compelling explanation for distinctive human emotional and mental aptitudes than do competing hypotheses. It suggests that what really distinguishes humans from other apes is not so much our competitive heritage as our more cooperative one, and that cooperative breeding left offspring who grew up in such systems with neuronal underpinnings for shared engagement. Flexibility and opportunism are hallmarks of cooperatively breeding species. The link between cooperative breeding and prolonged dependence was first demonstrated by behavioral ecologist Tom Langen in a comparative study of birds.
