Evolutionarily Speaking

As I was sitting up in bed with The Boy at 4:00 in the morning, wondering why he was awake and if I would ever sleep again, I started to muse about how this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. How is it helpful to have infants be so helpless for so long?

I soon realized that it's modern life that has screwed with the whole set up. I am guessing that human animals are born so helpless and remain helpless for so long because the only thing we humans have to keep us out of the food chain, i.e. not-get-eaten, is our big ol' brains. We are soft and squishy and relatively defenseless without the brains that allowed us to devise tools and schemes, further allowing us to kill and eat more often than we are killed and eaten. Human infants require human adults to take care of them until they are old enough to eat for themselves, which would have been much earlier than the current age, that seems to be 16, when kids are still expecting mom to get them lunch. That sixteen year old boy would have been out killing and providing for his family in cave times.

The gender division of labor meant something back then, and it made sense. Women have the breasts that feed the babies, so they need to be with said babies. What can they then do to further provide for the family? Strap the baby on and work communally to gather food, which was much more reliable and successful than the man way of going out and killing stuff. But the men were stronger and were not necessary for the baby feeding. They needed to do something to make themselves feel better about that.

The problem comes when value gets attached to this division of labor, and "women's work" is seen as somehow lesser than men's. This seems to me, again, a way for men to make themselves feel better about only being necessary for the sperm part of procreation. Man make fire, kill things. Man provide for family. This better than picking plants. I mean, it must have been rather baffling and magical, all the things that women can do. Making babies out of scratch and all.

I like meat, and if Men want to go out and kill it, I will certainly cook it and eat it. But it's no better or worse than me tending my garden and breast feeding The Boy.

Eh, who knows? This is 4 a.m. anthropological ramblings from a very tired lay person.