http://www.pnas.org/content/107/45/19195.full
The birds and the bees are different in the Amazon. There, a woman not only can be a little pregnant, most are. Each of the societies we’re about to discuss shares a belief in what scientists call “partible paternity.” These groups have a novel conception of conception: a fetus is made of accumulated semen.
Anthropologists Stephen Beckerman and Paul Valentine explain, “Pregnancy is viewed as a matter of degree, not clearly distinguished from gestation ... all sexually active women are a little pregnant. Over time ... semen accumulates in the womb, a fetus is formed, further acts of intercourse follow, and additional semen causes the fetus to grow more.” Were a woman to stop having sex when her periods stopped, people in these cultures believe the fetus would stop developing.
This understanding of how semen forms a child leads to some mighty interesting conclusions regarding “responsible” sexual behavior. Like mothers everywhere, a woman from these societies is eager to give her child every possible advantage in life. To this end, she’ll typically seek out sex with an assortment of men. She’ll solicit “contributions” from the best hunters, the best storytellers, the funniest, the kindest, the best-looking, the strongest, and so on - in the hopes her child will literally absorb the essence of each.
Anthropologists report similar understandings of conception and fetal development among many South American societies, ranging from simple hunter-gatherers to horticulturalists. A partial list would include the Ache, the Arawete, the Bari, the Canela, the Cashinahua, the Curripaco, the Ese Eja, the Kayapo, the Kulina, the Matis, the Mehinaku, the Piaroa, the Piraha, the Secoya, the Siona, the Warao, the Yanomami, and the Ye’kwana - societies from Venezuela to Bolivia. This is no ethnographic curiosity, either - a strange idea being passed among related cultures. The same understanding is found among cultural groups that show no evidence of contact for millennia. Nor is partible paternity limited to South America. For example, the Lusi of Papua New Guinea also hold that fetal development depends on multiple acts of intercourse, often with different men. Even today, the younger Lusi, who have some sense of the modern understanding of reproduction, agree that a person can have more than one father.
As Beckerman and Valentine explain, “It is difficult to come to any conclusion except that partible paternity is an ancient folk belief capable of supporting effective families, families that provide satisfactory paternal care of children and manage the successful rearing of children to adulthood.”
When an anthropologist working in Paraguay asked his Ache subjects to identify their fathers, he was presented with a mathematical puzzle that could be solved only with a vocabulary lesson. The 321 Ache claimed to have over six hundred fathers. Who’s your daddies?
It turns out the Ache distinguish four different kinds of fathers. According to the anthropologist Kim Hill, the four types of fathers are:
- Miare: the father who put it in;
- Peroare: the fathers who mixed it;
- Momboare: those who spilled it out; and
- Bykuare: the fathers who provided the child’s essence.
Rather than being shunned as “bastards” or “sons of bitches,” children of multiple fathers benefit from having more than one man who takes a special interest in them. Anthropologists have calculated that their chances of surviving childhood are often significantly better than those of children in the same societies with just one recognized father.
Far from being enraged at having his genetic legacy called into question, a man in these societies is likely to feel gratitude to other men for pitching in to help create and then care for a stronger baby. Far from being blinded by jealousy as the standard narrative predicts, men in these societies find themselves bound to one another by shared paternity for the children they’ve fathered together. As Beckerman explains, in the worst-case scenario, this system may provide extra security for the child: “You know that if you die, there’s some other man who has a residual obligation to care for at least one of your children. So looking the other way or even giving your blessing when your wife takes a lover is the only insurance you can buy.”
Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern
Relationships - Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha
https://chrisryanphd.com/
...According to Deihl, the Efé people of Ituri Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo practice alloparenting, with care for infants coming from siblings, grandparents, and older members of the community. Deihl states that where siblings are alloparents this provides adolescents experience of being a parent, and that similar practice in the United States would reduce the rate of teenage pregnancy and make teenage parents "better parent[s] when they do become parents".
In biology, "Cooperatively breeding vertebrate systems are characterized by individual ‘helpers’ that take care of young ones within the social group that are not their own offspring - a behaviour termed ‘alloparental care’. In mammals, care typically encompasses allolactation, pup-feeding, babysitting and carrying young." An example of this in nature is when male Barbary macaques carry around unrelated infants and care for them for hours at a time.
http://www.livescience.com/27128-polyamory-myths-debunked.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alloparenting
To alloparent is to provide care for offspring that are not your own. It is a behavior that is unimaginable for most species (few of which even care for their own offspring), rare even among relatively nurturant classes of animals like birds and mammals, and central to the existence of humankind. The vigor and promiscuity with which humans in every culture around the world alloparent stands in stark contrast to widespread misconceptions about who we are and how we should raise our children.
Humans’ survival as a species over the last 200,000 years has depended on our motivation and ability to care for one another’s children. Our babies are born as helpless and needy as it is possible for a living creature to be...
...the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy has described, among foraging cultures that best approximate our ancestral conditions, human babies never rely on only one person, or even two people, for care. Instead they are played with, protected, cleaned, transported, and fed (even nursed) by a wide array of relatives and other group members—as many as twenty different individuals every day, in some cases. And the more alloparenting children get, the more likely they are to survive and flourish.
You would never know any of this from reading most modern books on child development or childrearing. Attachment to and responsive care from a single primary caregiver (invariably the mother) is nearly always portrayed as the critical ingredient for a child’s optimal development. When fathers or other caregivers are mentioned at all, their impact is described as neutral at best. The implicit message is that for a baby to spend significant time apart from the mother in the care of other caregivers, like babysitters or daycare providers, is unnatural and potentially harmful.
But the opposite is more likely true. As the historian Stephanie Coontz has put it, human children “do best in societies where childrearing is considered too important to be left entirely to parents.” When children receive care from a network of loving caregivers, not only are mothers relieved of the nearly impossible burden of caring for and rearing a needy human infant alone, but their children gain the opportunity to learn from an array of supportive adults, to form bonds with them, and to learn to love and trust widely rather than narrowly.
Children are not the only beneficiaries of humans’ fulsome alloparenting capacities. Across primate species, the prevalence of alloparenting is also the single best predictor of a behavior that theories portraying human nature as motivated strictly by rational self-interest struggle to explain: altruism. Not reciprocal altruism or altruism toward close kin (which are self-interested) but costly acts of altruism for unrelated others, even strangers. This sort of altruism can seem inexplicable according to dominant accounts of altruism like reciprocity and kin selection. But it is perfectly consistent with the idea that, as alloparents sine qua non, humans are designed to be attuned to and motivated to care for a wide array of needy and vulnerable others. Altruism for one another is likely an exaptation of evolved neural mechanisms that equip us to alloparent.
Remember this if you are ever tempted to write off all humanity as a lost cause. We have our flaws, without a doubt, but we can also lay claim to being the species shaped by evolution to possess the most open hearts and the most abundant capacity for care on earth.
Alloparenting - a concept that ought to be more widely known.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27081
...alloparenting is not altruistic behavior. Every alloparent has “ulterior motives” for alloparenting—but they cannot always control these motives. Some are hardwired into the alloparent’s brain or stimulated by emotions that driven by self-interest. Others are more thought-out and voluntary. The main self-interested motives are: education and play, reciprocation, and genetic interest.
Young of conspecifics fascinates most pre-reproductive animals (especially females), most prevalently of which are those of mammals and birds. Oftentimes young and offspring-less sub-adults will spend time around mothers looking for any opportunity to hold, touch, groom, or otherwise have contact with their young. This behavior is play and education-oriented alloparenting and is an expression of budding maternal/paternal (in some species) instinct; the immature individual has a chance to “practice” with the young of others. This, like other play behaviors, is a preparatory, readying the individual for caring for their own young in the future...
...Genetic interest is possibly the best reason for an individual to provide allocare for related young. Many animals act as alloparents for their siblings, cousins, and other closely related young. It is genetically advantageous for an individual to do this even though they are not reproducing on their own. Siblings share roughly half of an individual’s genetic makeup, first cousins share roughly a quarter of an individual’s genetic makeup, and so on. To rear these bearers of at least a portion of your genes is wise, as the cared-for young are part of an individual’s genetic legacy, which they strive to make as large as possible.
Alloparenting-What Is It?
http://www.biology-online.org/articles/alloparenting-what.html
