NOWHERE is the uniquely human cocktail of cooperation, tolerance, mind-reading and empathy more on display than when we are shoehorned together into a crowded airplane. We smile politely at people who bump into us, offer sympathetic nods to mothers of wailing babies, and offer our untouched dessert to the stranger in the adjacent seat.
After inviting us to reflect on this behaviour, points out just how odd it is. If we were travelling with a planeload of chimps, she says, “any one of us would be lucky to disembark with all 10 fingers and toes still attached, with the baby still breathing and unmaimed”.
In this compelling and wide-ranging book, Hrdy sets out to explain the mystery of how humans evolved into cooperative apes. The demands of raising our slow-growing and energetically expensive offspring led to cooperative child-rearing, she argues, which was key to our survival.
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Harvard University Press