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Substitute Parents: Biological and Social Perspectives on Alloparenting in Human Societies, edited by Gillian Bentley and Ruth Mace. Studies of the Biosocial Society, v. 3. Oxford, U.K.: Berghahn, 2009. 336 pp. £58 (hardcover).
Investigators of ecology and evolutionary biology have extensively explored the involvement of parents and other kin in the care provided to juveniles. This has led to many empirical and theoretical advances in our understanding of the parentoffspring conflict, kin selection, and the evolution of sociality and altruism. In humans, however, investigating the role played by adults in child care, according to their gender and how they are related to the child, has proved difficult. As a consequence, the emergence of alloparental behaviors during human evolution is yet unsolved. This is because humans are highly social, long-lived, iteroparous, and dimorphic and because they care for children of different ages at the same time and show many unusual life-history traits. Other factors are the peculiar evolution of the hominins and the many uncertainties concerning human origins, the complexity of socioeconomic relationships between individuals within and between families, and, most of all, the variation of these across cultures and through time. More than in any other species, a multidisciplinary approach is therefore needed to investigate alloparental care in humans, and we should therefore welcome Substitute Parents, which, as the editors put it, "brings together a variety of contributors who can cover the topic of alloparenting from widely different perspectives."
Substitute Parents opens with an excellent review, by N. G. Solomon and L. D. Hayes, of alloparental behaviors in ecology. In this review Solomon and Hayes give a structured panorama of the alloparenting strategies across vertebrates and discuss with pedagogy the evolutionary theories of alloparenting. This chapter, together with S. Hrdy's prologue and the editors' introduction, sets the scene for the ecologie and evolutionary theater in which human behaviors play. This theoretical background agreeably echoes throughout the 14 following chapters, which address the fundamental questions of parenting and substitute parenting in humans: Who is caring for the children and...