ReviewEvolutionary anthropology2025
Cooperative Breeding as a Likely Early Catalyst of Human Evolution.
Review in Evolutionary anthropology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reading hominin life history in fossil bones and teeth: methods to test hypotheses regarding its evolution.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- The perception of prosocial agents by chimpanzees and humans.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Hunter-Gatherer children's close-proximity networks: Similarities and differences with cooperative and communal breeding systems.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Agentic processes in cultural evolution: relevance to Anthropocene sustainability.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Article
- Innovation across 13 ungulate species: problem solvers are less integrated in the social group and less neophobic.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Shared reproductive disruption, not neural crest or tameness, explains the domestication syndrome.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Review
- A convergent interaction engine: vocal communication among marmoset monkeys.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Sexual Selection and the Treatment of Predecessors' Progeny by Replacement Mates.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- Infant Social Withdrawal Behavior: A Key for Adaptation in the Face of Relational Adversity.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Cooperative care and the evolution of the prelinguistic vocal learning.Developmental psychobiology · 2021Article
- Domestication Phenotype Linked to Vocal Behavior in Marmoset Monkeys.Current biology : CB · 2020Article
- The developmental support hypothesis: adaptive plasticity in neural development in response to cues of social support.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- The human life history is adapted to exploit the adaptive advantages of culture.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Cognitive consequences of our grandmothering life history: cultural learning begins in infancy.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Baby cry recognition is independent of motherhood but improved by experience and exposure.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Why Care: Complex Evolutionary History of Human Healthcare Networks.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
- Recognition Memory in Marmoset and Macaque Monkeys: A Comparison of Active Vision.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2019Article
- Prosociality and a Sociosexual Hypothesis for the Evolution of Same-Sex Attraction in Humans.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Hypotheses for the Evolution of Reduced Reactive Aggression in the Context of Human Self-Domestication.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Unlike any other great ape, humans give birth to large, secondarily altricial babies, show precocial social development, have bigger brains that require a long maturation period, and engage in cooperative breeding (CB). These traits, which characterize the human adaptive complex, are intricately linked and must have mutually reinforced each other over evolutionary time. Here, we use recent evidence from paleontology, developmental psychology, and pediatrics, complemented with comparative analyses, to ask what may have triggered this coevolutionary feedback loop: bipedality, direct selection on altriciality, a higher-quality diet, or cooperative breeding. An early adoption of extensive allomaternal care during human evolution, that is, the CB-first model, best accommodates the available data. In particular, CB was a catalyst enabling further increases in brain size, because even though larger brains slow down life history and neurodevelopment and thus lead to a demographic dilemma, CB enabled the necessary increase in birth rates.
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