The "Science" of Caveman Parenting

While trying to decide on further content for this blog,  my wife came across this article from 2013:
The Science of Cavemom Parenting

I believe that this article does an excellent job at relating the issues with many current trends to "get back to our roots" in one way or another.  Which roots? From when? I would like to elaborate on the author's main points.  In addition I would like to clarify what I believe an evolutionary approach to a problem or, in this case, a broad guiding principal would look like.  

The primary concern with these movements is that they assume a period of stasis in human evolution. At the risk of using a direct quote: "there is no time in human history when we've been biologically ideal and perfectly adapted to our surroundings — evolution just doesn't work this way" (Turgeon, 2013), who was paraphrasing Marlene Zuc from her book, Paleofantasy.  

One evolutionary theme to the genus Homo and its predecessors is ever increasing adaptability.   Ever since our ancestors began experimenting with life outside the jungle and isolated themselves geographically from the ancestors of Chimpanzees, between 6 million and 7 million years ago, every recognizable step towards Homo sapiens has been characterized by increased adaptability.  

Adaptation, unlike evolution which occurs within populations, occurs within the individual.  Our ancestors slowly become mega omnivores, eating nearly anything we could digest.  They constantly developed new strategies to survive upon and subsist on the land. This was not because they were bent on some evolutionary trajectory towards the perfection we apparently achieved in 17th century Europe, it was because Africa was constantly trying to kill them.  

Good Times

Bad Times

Of course there were always lions, and hyenas and poisonous thing trying to kill them from the beginning, but it was Africa's geography that was always the biggest threat. Africa, it turns out, is particularly sensitive to climate change.  Dozens of times during pre-history, climate change brought about rapid and radical environmental changes to Africa.  Each time this occurred, those who did not adapt died, and those who did were dispersed to isolated populations to rebuild, often learning a new subsistence pattern in the process.  

I love living in the jungle!

"Crap, it's time to lean how to eat bugs again."

In fact having spent an extra 400,000 years in Africa may be what gave our ancestors the upper hand, whatever it was, in Europe over the Neanderthals.  Some recent papers dispute this traditional idea ( Villa P, 2014) stating that Neanderthals were not as dumb as previously thought.  Their tool industries and burial practices showed them to be every bit as advanced as our own sub-species.  Of course these are cultural adaptations, and the result of having nearly the exact same brain as our ancestors. What cannot be accounted for so easily is their ability, or inability, to rapidly adapt to subtle changes, whether it be in climate or the politics of sharing their land with ambitious and adaptable people from somewhere else.  

"Why are you idiots eating grass?"

This trend of evolving to be adaptable has continued since the demise of the Neanderthals, and perhaps has accelerated since the advent of agriculture. I myself am a data point in one instance demonstrating this.  During the early Holocene I would have been considered neurotypical, at least with regard to the way my brain manages its dopamine stores.  Now they call me ADD.  We all know that people "afflicted" with ADD do not adapt as well to the post-modern world and that as many as 3% of adults in the United States suffer from this "disorder."  

"Farming is hard.  Swimming is fun."

Imagine how powerful an evolutionary selector the ability to direct one's own attention to what the conscious mind decides is important has been if in 8,000 years or less the percent of people who have been able to do so has gone from a minority of the population to almost every one.   

Speaking of recent evolution toward adaptability: how about that wheat? I'll go ahead an pick on the Paleo Diet again because it is so easy.  The main reason advocates of the Paleo Diet give for abstaining from grains is they believe that our ancestors did not eat grains.  This is most likely true: if you go back at least 4 million years (Wynn et. al., 2013).  Stable isotope analysis of Australopithecus afarensis fossils show us that by the time these tiny, bipedal ape-people roamed the earth, a significant enough portion of the hominin diet consisted of grasses and grains to leave its mark on their bones.  

What does this juxtaposition of a recent evolutionary development and the evidence that we have indeed been eating grains far longer than we could be called human tell us? Nothing! Well, not much, and that's the point, I suppose. As an anthropologist I love the idea of attempting to make decisions that are informed by evolutionary biology.  A shorter way to say that is: I like science.  

The problem has been that many people, believing they are approaching a problem from an evolutionary perspective, forgo the examination of existing data, or the researching of new frontiers, and simply go on their own powers of reason.  One may be the best logician in the world, but will never be able to solve a real world problem without real world data.  

In lieu of the facts, the Paleo Diet makes total sense.  Who remembers "Eat Right for Your Blood Type?"  It was another great concept which was also pulled directly out of someone's rear.  Both of these ideas would have made great hypotheses for scientific study, and plenty could have been learned by the authors in the course of rejecting their hypotheses.  Of course it turns out that science doesn't pay and that sensationalism does. 

Lets get back to those hypotheses.  A good evolutionary approach would consist of hypotheses based on observations of prehistoric behavior or historic/modern analogs.  Of course we must then test these hypotheses using actual modern humans.

Lets go over some instances where this has indeed occurred, and have become mainstream. These will be brief as this is getting long, and I can go over them in  more detail in the future.  

Breastfeeding.  It turns out that despite the claims of formula makers in the 60's, mother's milk really is best.  Medical anthropologists like Katherine Dettwyler helped bring this to the world attention and modern science has demonstrated that many of the previously unknown benefits of mother's milk are really hard (currently impossible) to replicate. Of course, as I stressed above, humans are adaptable and if the results from the picture below were typical pretty much all of the boomer generation would be stunted physically, emotionally, and psychologically.  

 Five months old twins from Islamabad, Pakistan. The bottlefed twin, a girl, was malnourished and suffered from frequent bouts of diarrhea. (Courtesy of Dr. Mushtaq A. Khan, Pakistan Institute of Medical Science, Islamabad.

 Carrying your baby. Most people in the world don't have strollers, and there is a certain satisfaction to keeping your wee one close to you so it would seem that there would be some advantage to wearing your baby. And indeed there is some research to show that babies that are worn are happier, develop better communication with mother, and exhibit better development in some psychological areas. Again, your baby will be fine if you can't or don't want to wear it.  Especially when you are training for a marathon. 

No room for strollers in here.  

Co-sleeping. Cuddling with your babies is nice. It may also be safer. 


Here are a few ideas for future research.

Diaper Free. Pampers were invented the year my brother was born (1962), yet we millennial and gen x parents act like revolutionaries for using "cloth" diapers.  Still much of the children in the world will never see a diaper.  Not everybody can afford 50 cents every time baby pees, or can do a whole wash every day.  I don't know of any research that suggests any developmental benefits of forgoing diapers, but I do like to let my boys air out as much as possible.  I do not see this catching on in the West.  

My cave baby, temporarily diaper free

Freezing your baby. Icelanders' babies sleep outside in the winter, and they have low crime and an above average lifespan.  Is there a correlation?

I hadn't necessarily planned on tackling all of that in one post, but hopefully it will set the way for me to explore much of these topics in more depth in the future. That's ADD for you.  Sometimes when you get going, you really get going.  Someday I'll learn to read back through what I've read and do some editing.  Enjoy!

Villa P, Roebroeks W (2014) Neandertal Demise: An Archaeological Analysis of the Modern Human Superiority Complex. PLoS ONE 9(4): e96424. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0096424

1. Wynn JG, 
2. et al.

 (2013) Diet of Australopithecus afarensis from the Pliocene Hadar Formation, Ethiopia. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 110:10495–10500.