Sarah Hrdy, Health and society, Tue 7 July

Darwin and the ascent of emotionally modern man: how humans became such hypersocial apes
Professor Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (University of California, Davis, USA)

Summary: As Darwin observed early on, humans are remarkably similar to other apes. Like their larger brained, bipedal cousins, great apes also use tools and exhibit a rudimentary understanding of causality and theory of mind. However, other apes fall short of humans in intention-reading and cooperation. In this lecture I explain why I am convinced that the psychological and emotional underpinnings for apes to care so much about what others intend and feel emerged as a byproduct of shared parental and alloparental care and provisioning of young, what sociobiologists refer to as cooperative breeding. According to widely accepted chronology, large-brained, anatomically modern humans evolved around 150,000 years ago, and behaviourally modern humans, capable of symbolic thought and language, more recently still, between 50,00080,000 years ago. But (I argue) emotionally modern humans, newly interested in the mental and subjective states of others and characterized by prosocial impulses to give and share, emerged far earlier along with what, for an ape, was a peculiar mode of rearing young.