What's odd is that the threats children faced in pre-modern societies generally seem like a mother's worry couldn't have alleviated them much. Infectious disease and starvation were the overwhelming reasons why roughly half of children died before adulthood across pre-modern cultures. But it seems like the main way a mother could keep he…
What's odd is that the threats children faced in pre-modern societies generally seem like a mother's worry couldn't have alleviated them much. Infectious disease and starvation were the overwhelming reasons why roughly half of children died before adulthood across pre-modern cultures. But it seems like the main way a mother could keep her children from starving was by not having too many of them in the first place (hence the prevalence of infanticide), and before the germ theory of disease there was pretty much nothing a mother could do to protect them from infection.
Is it that Malthusian agricultural societies represented a divergence from the hunter-gatherer norm, which is what actually shaped human instincts? It does seem like violence from males and accidents (both of which seem easier for maternal vigilance to ward off) were bigger threats to hunter-gatherer children, while malnutrition and infectious disease were less common than they later became.
Befire the 20th century children died at such rates that also rather small diffences in survival had an impact. Starvation is seldom absolute. As long as there is something to eat at all, worried and attentive parents are more likely to get it to the child who needscitvthe most (or the child they most want to save).
David Good, son of Anthropologist Kenneth Good and Yanomamö teenage girl Yarima, tells about one thing that actually could be done against infection. In his book The Way Around he writes about an accident when he learned to clear land with a machete in his mother's village. He got a twig or something in his eye and it was badly hurt. He was in extreme pain and couldn't see. A few times a day his "wife" (complicated history) appeared and poured some liquid into his eye, which relieved his pain. After a few rounds of that treatment he realized what is was: breast milk. With only that treatment David's eye got better and he got his vision back.
By the way, I read your bio and saw that you like cetaceans. A year ago I tried to learn everything about cetaceans, especially about their social lives. But I didn't learn much because I found few books for grown-ups on the subject. Do you have any tips on how to learn as much as possible about the social lives of dolphins and whales?
What's odd is that the threats children faced in pre-modern societies generally seem like a mother's worry couldn't have alleviated them much. Infectious disease and starvation were the overwhelming reasons why roughly half of children died before adulthood across pre-modern cultures. But it seems like the main way a mother could keep her children from starving was by not having too many of them in the first place (hence the prevalence of infanticide), and before the germ theory of disease there was pretty much nothing a mother could do to protect them from infection.
Is it that Malthusian agricultural societies represented a divergence from the hunter-gatherer norm, which is what actually shaped human instincts? It does seem like violence from males and accidents (both of which seem easier for maternal vigilance to ward off) were bigger threats to hunter-gatherer children, while malnutrition and infectious disease were less common than they later became.
Befire the 20th century children died at such rates that also rather small diffences in survival had an impact. Starvation is seldom absolute. As long as there is something to eat at all, worried and attentive parents are more likely to get it to the child who needscitvthe most (or the child they most want to save).
David Good, son of Anthropologist Kenneth Good and Yanomamö teenage girl Yarima, tells about one thing that actually could be done against infection. In his book The Way Around he writes about an accident when he learned to clear land with a machete in his mother's village. He got a twig or something in his eye and it was badly hurt. He was in extreme pain and couldn't see. A few times a day his "wife" (complicated history) appeared and poured some liquid into his eye, which relieved his pain. After a few rounds of that treatment he realized what is was: breast milk. With only that treatment David's eye got better and he got his vision back.
By the way, I read your bio and saw that you like cetaceans. A year ago I tried to learn everything about cetaceans, especially about their social lives. But I didn't learn much because I found few books for grown-ups on the subject. Do you have any tips on how to learn as much as possible about the social lives of dolphins and whales?