Os Bastidores do Zoo

Num belo e divertido texto de Tiago Salazar para a revista Notícias do DN:

Nos 125 anos do Jardim Zoológico de Lisboa a nm foi ver como se vive o quotidiano nos bastidores, para lá das jaulas, gaiolas e aquários. Descobrimos, por exemplo, que as palavras amizade e amor são possíveis entre homens (tratadores) e répteis, ocapis, gorilas ou baleias.

Mais...

Partly Cloudy, a nova curta da Pixar

Que será exibida antes de Up - Altamente! (dizem...), a próxima estreia.

Chamam-lhe Terra

Website

Sita Sings the Blues

Um achado!
Grátis!
Disponível no Youtube, for pete's sake!
Prémio Especial do Júri no nosso festival Monstra!*
Delicioso!
Baseado no Ramayana! (tradução inglesa)
;)

Dear Audience,

I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.

You don't need my permission to copy, share, publish, archive, show, sell, broadcast, or remix Sita Sings the Blues. Conventional wisdom urges me to demand payment for every use of the film, but then how would people without money get to see it? How widely would the film be disseminated if it were limited by permission and fees? Control offers a false sense of security. The only real security I have is trusting you, trusting culture, and trusting freedom.

* Cujo website é uma seca, desculpem lá :(

The Princess and the Frog

First black princess ever? From Disney?





Official website

The MessMaker ;)

Perspectivas: The Case Against Breast-Feeding

One afternoon at the playground last summer, shortly after the birth of my third child, I made the mistake of idly musing about breast-feeding to a group of new mothers I’d just met. This time around, I said, I was considering cutting it off after a month or so. At this remark, the air of insta-friendship we had established cooled into an icy politeness, and the mothers shortly wandered away to chase little Emma or Liam onto the slide. Just to be perverse, over the next few weeks I tried this experiment again several more times. The reaction was always the same: circles were redrawn such that I ended up in the class of mom who, in a pinch, might feed her baby mashed-up Chicken McNuggets.

In my playground set, the urban moms in their tight jeans and oversize sunglasses size each other up using a whole range of signifiers: organic content of snacks, sleekness of stroller, ratio of tasteful wooden toys to plastic. But breast-feeding is the real ticket into the club. My mother friends love to exchange stories about subversive ways they used to sneak frozen breast milk through airline security (it’s now legal), or about the random brutes on the street who don’t approve of breast-feeding in public. When Angelina Jolie wanted to secure her status as America’s ur-mother, she posed on the cover of W magazine nursing one of her twins. Alt-rocker Pete Wentz recently admitted that he tasted his wife, Ashlee Simpson’s, breast milk (“soury” and “weird”), after bragging that they have a lot of sex—both of which must have seemed to him markers of a cool domestic existence.

From the moment a new mother enters the obstetrician’s waiting room, she is subjected to the upper-class parents’ jingle: “Breast Is Best.” Parenting magazines offer “23 Great Nursing Tips,” warnings on “Nursing Roadblocks,” and advice on how to find your local lactation consultant (note to the childless: yes, this is an actual profession, and it’s thriving). Many of the stories are accompanied by suggestions from the ubiquitous parenting guru Dr. William Sears, whose Web site hosts a comprehensive list of the benefits of mother’s milk. “Brighter Brains” sits at the top: “I.Q. scores averaging seven to ten points higher!” (Sears knows his audience well.) The list then moves on to the dangers averted, from infancy on up: fewer ear infections, allergies, stomach illnesses; lower rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease. Then it adds, for good measure, stool with a “buttermilk-like odor” and “nicer skin”—benefits, in short, “more far-reaching than researchers have even dared to imagine.”

In 2005, Babytalk magazine won a National Magazine Award for an article called “You Can Breastfeed.” Given the prestige of the award, I had hoped the article might provide some respite from the relentlessly cheerful tip culture of the parenting magazines, and fill mothers in on the real problems with nursing. Indeed, the article opens with a promisingly realistic vignette, featuring a theoretical “You” cracking under the strain of having to breast-feed around the clock, suffering “crying jags” and cursing at your husband. But fear not, You. The root of the problem is not the sudden realization that your ideal of an equal marriage, with two parents happily taking turns working and raising children, now seems like a farce. It turns out to be quite simple: You just haven’t quite figured out how to fit “Part A into Part B.” Try the “C-hold” with your baby and some “rapid arm movement,” the story suggests. Even Dr. Sears pitches in: “Think ‘fish lips,’” he offers.

In the days after my first child was born, I welcomed such practical advice. I remember the midwife coming to my hospital bed and shifting my arm here, and the baby’s head there, and then everything falling into place. But after three children and 28 months of breast-feeding (and counting), the insistent cheerleading has begun to grate. Buttermilk-like odor? Now Dr. Sears is selling me too hard. I may have put in fewer parenting years than he has, but I do have some perspective. And when I look around my daughter’s second-grade class, I can’t seem to pick out the unfortunate ones: “Oh, poor little Sophie, whose mother couldn’t breast-feed. What dim eyes she has. What a sickly pallor. And already sprouting acne!”

I dutifully breast-fed each of my first two children for the full year that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends. I have experienced what the Babytalk story calls breast-feeding-induced “maternal nirvana.” This time around, nirvana did not describe my state of mind; I was launching a new Web site and I had two other children to care for, and a husband I would occasionally like to talk to. Being stuck at home breast-feeding as he walked out the door for work just made me unreasonably furious, at him and everyone else.

In Betty Friedan’s day, feminists felt shackled to domesticity by the unreasonably high bar for housework, the endless dusting and shopping and pushing the Hoover around—a vacuum cleaner being the obligatory prop for the “happy housewife heroine,” as Friedan sardonically called her. When I looked at the picture on the cover of Sears’s Breastfeeding Book—a lady lying down, gently smiling at her baby and still in her robe, although the sun is well up—the scales fell from my eyes: it was not the vacuum that was keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound. (...)

Lengthy article from The Atlantic

Feliz Dia da Mãe ;)

Ajudar o Malawi

Sabido em Chocolate & Zucchini

Mega LEGO

A Biblioteca do Lucas e o Prémio Nacional de Ilustração (2009)

Começo aqui uma série de posts com a etiqueta Biblioteca, pois alguns dos livrinhos afixados e desejados sempre vêm cá parar ;)
E aproveito o ensejo para dar os Parabéns a Madalena Matoso, vencedora do Prémio Nacional de Ilustração com A Charada da Bicharada, livrinho que está todo pimpão na Biblioteca do Lucas, sei lá.
A ilustradora teve ainda outra distinção com o livro Trava-Línguas, o qual também já cá canta :)
Somos uns vaidosos...

Os primeiros dias do Bebé

E as emoções dos animais

UP

Bisonte Bebé

Telegraph Animals of the Week Gallery
Que eu nunca tinha visto, e que, como todas as coisas «pequeninas», é uma ternura :)

Behold the Fearsome Predator

On the vast arid plains of the Serengeti, the silent and deadly jaguar awaits his prey.

Victim in sight, he creeps slowly forward, his mighty paw raised for the killing stroke… and then…

WHUMP! "Oh, hi boss! I was just, ah… walking around the yard, minding my own business… you know, thinking about stuff… and definitely not stalking you, honest, I would never do that."

Rare jaguar cub born last year at Huachipa Zoo in Lima, Peru. Details here.

Cute Overload

Daniel

Feliz Páscoa

Vida Animal da semana no Telegraph

iPlayPhone

E porque nesta casa há um iPhone, sei lá ;)

Diz-nos o criador da aplicaçãozinha, Ryan Neudorf:

All the buttons play goofy sounds. The onShake sound totally baffles my son, he’s like “woah, i shake it and is makes sounds…weird.”

Sea Life no Porto ;)

SEA LIFE Porto will introduce you to many strange, beatuiful and fascinating creatures of the deep. Prepare for astonishing close views of everything from humble starfish to mighty sharks, all in displays which carefully recreate their natural habitats.

Discover the truth about the much-misunderstood shark; the plight of the endangered sea turtle; the remarkable lives of seahorses and countless more surprising facts about these and other incredible creatures.

Sea Life Europe website

Livros e Crianças e livros para crianças organizados

aqui nos linques à esquerda, a saber:

I Festa do Livro Infantil

Em 1967 foi instituído o Dia Internacional do Livro Infantil com o objectivo de contribuir para fomentar do gosto pela leitura entre os mais novos. Escolheu-se o dia 2 de Abril para o assinalar por ser o dia em que nasceu Hans Christian Andersen, escritor dinamarquês universalmente conhecido pelas suas histórias infantis.

O Município de Lisboa, decidiu, este ano, assinalar esta data com a I Festa do Livro Infantil de Lisboa que decorrerá na Praça da Figueira de 27 de Março a 5 de Abril.

Diariamente, entre as 10h00 e as 20h00, os visitantes encontrarão outros motivos de interesse, nomeadamente no programa de animação. Sessões de apresentação/lançamento de livros com a presença de autores portugueses, leitura de obras para crianças na Hora do Conto, Ateliers, área de leitura exterior e a presença da Biblioteca Itinerante da CML, aos sábados e Domingos das 14 às 18h, são alguns dos eventos que terão lugar no âmbito da Festa.

Programa ;)

Oh, senhoresssss ;))

Comidaa

Especial Nutrição na revista de domingo do DN



Alguns artigos disponíveis online,
entre os quais este, muito interessante,
sobre os Açúcares

Com dois dias de idade

Telegraph

E alarmes para lembrar da existência de bebés nos mil aparelhómetros que se adora ter hoje em dia, não?

À falta de alarme na cabeça, no coração, no instinto, nem sei o que digo, é escabroso...

Um menino de nove meses morreu fechado no carro do pai, onde ficou durante três horas sob o sol forte da manhã. O pai terá optado por deixar o filho a dormitar em vez de o levar logo à creche, que fica mesmo ao lado, mas acabou por esquecer-se dele no automóvel. Pode vir a ser acusado de homicídio por negligência.

Mais no DN online

How to Write Books for Children

Todos os Rapazes São Gatos

Texto dramático de forte pendor metafórico, Todos os Rapazes São Gatos é também um hino à liberdade e à irreverência da juventude, assim como à espontaneidade dos afectos, ao mesmo tempo que dá conta das dúvidas da personagem relativas ao seu crescimento e à sua auto-imagem. O simbolismo das referências felinas que dominam o protagonista e a forma como ele se relaciona com o mundo e com os outros excedem a sua simples caracterização e dão o mote para o desenvolvimento da acção. As ilustrações de Alain Corbel recuperam de forma original a metáfora que estrutura o texto, redimensionando-o. | Ana Margarida Ramos

Título Todos os rapazes são gatos | Autor(es) Álvaro Magalhães, Alain Corbel (ilustrador) | Tipo de documento Livro | Editora Edições Asa | Local Porto | Data de edição 2004 | Área Temática Infância, Afectos, Casa, Família, Animais, Linguagem, Sonho | ISBN 972-41-3582-9 |

Casa da Leitura

Wishlist: A Infância é um Território Desconhecido

Who is Luke?

Finding out about Luke is a bit like tracing your family tree. Some of it is easy, because there is documentary proof, some of it is based on the fairly reliable evidence of what your parents and grandparents told you, and some of it has to be inferred, guessed and imagined. Luke was writing for someone who already knew him, Theophilus, and so he didn't bother to introduce himself. Books, in those days, were handwritten, not mass-produced, and though Theophilus probably had a few copies made for friends, all of them would have known either Luke or Theophilus, so no author's biography was necessary. In fact, he doesn't actually tell us his name at all. We know it because it always circulated as the work of one called Luke. The story Luke is telling is not about himself, though he was there to see parts of it, so uncovering Luke is a matter of piecing together scraps of evidence.

Although the name was quite a common one, ancient tradition has usually identified our Luke with the Luke whom the apostle Paul mentions twice. Paul is an important character in The Acts of the Apostles, and our writer does seem to have travelled with Paul on some of his missionary journeys. In fact we seem to have parts of Luke's travel diary reproduced in, for example, Acts 21, where the writer suddenly starts to talk about what "we" did, rather than using the third person narrative of the rest of the book.

So it would not be surprising if Paul's writings also mention Luke. In two of the letters of Paul that are preserved in the New Testament, Paul does indeed talk about Luke. In one letter, written to a man called Philemon, Paul adds greetings at the end of the letter from some of the other people who are with him. He says, in effect "and lots of love from Luke, too". He calls Luke his "fellow-worker", and though that is not exactly a recognised job-description, it does suggest someone whom Paul trusts and who is known, at least by reputation, to Philemon and other Christians.

The second mention is in a letter Paul wrote to the Colossian Christians. Again, Paul adds Luke's greetings at the end of the letter, and he calls Luke "the beloved physician". We know that Paul suffered from something that he called his "thorn in the flesh", and although there has been endless speculation about what exactly this might have been, it is possible that it was an ailment that made it helpful for him to have a doctor with him on some of his travels.

This is certainly how the Christians in the time immediately after the period in which the New Testament was being written knew Luke. The Muratorian Canon, which was an early list of important Christian writings, from around the end of the 2nd century, calls the author of Luke's Gospel and Acts "Luke the physician and companion of Paul". Irenaeus, who was bishop of Lyons at around the same time, also takes that for granted. So, clearly, wherever the manuscripts circulated, that explanation of their provenance circulated with them. That may sound unusual and unreliable to modern ears, but it is constitutes a high degree of certainty for a manuscript that comes from a culture where oral tradition and eye-witness accounts were the main form of historical record.

So much for the external evidence about Luke. His own writings tell us a little bit more. He writes really lovely, educated, fluent Greek. When he quotes the Jewish scriptures, which he does a lot, he is clearly using the Greek translation which we know as the Septuagint. He is well-read, and knows the conventions about how to write "proper" history, in a way that would be acceptable to his well-connected patron, Theophilus.

At the beginning of his gospel, he tells us that he has investigated everything carefully and written an "orderly account". He does not claim to have met Jesus, but he does claim to have used eye-witness statements about the events he is relating. Although he and Theophilus are both already believers, they are not credulous idiots. They want to know the evidence. Being a Christian at this period in history is not going to do anything for their social standing and is, at the very least, going to lose them friends among the educated, ruling Roman elite, so they need to go into this with their eyes open.

Luke's own personality only comes through very obliquely. He seems to have cared deeply for the poor and the marginalised – it is Luke who tells us that the first witnesses of the birth of Jesus are rough shepherds. All the gospels agree that women were unusually active and accepted in early Christianity, but it is Luke who preserves some of the best stories about them – for example, the story about Jesus' mother, Mary and Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist (Luke 1). Luke, more than any of the other gospel writers, notices that Jesus' mission was always potentially inclusive. In Acts, he chronicles how the Christian community grew so that it was no longer racially, culturally or socially exclusive, and you can't help wondering if that is one of the things that attracted him to it in the first place. This is a movement that starts with the small people.

All in all, I think Luke would have been a nice man to have dinner with. He would listen, without letting his eyes wander to find someone more important; he would talk wisely and well; he would make you feel that, however unimportant and mundane your life might appear, it could actually be part of some huge, exciting movement for change. That's what the story of Acts suggests.

From the How to believe series, The Guardian

Oh que delícia: Feed the Kitty (tm)

Gamewright, mágicos!

Tragam isto para cá (mas a preços decentes...

... preços portuguesitos :)

Videos para Crianças: Kideo Player :)

Directamente do YouTube, filtrados para crianças

Ora isto é que interessa :)

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Children of older fathers appear to perform less well in intelligence tests during infancy and childhood, a study by researchers in Australia shows.

In contrast, the study found that children with older mothers tended to gain higher scores in the same tests designed to measure the ability to think and reason, including concentration, learning, memory, speaking and reading skills.

Men and women are having children later particularly in developed countries. But while the effects of having children later for women are widely discussed, consequences of increased paternal age are not as well known.

Recent studies have drawn links between older fathers and specific health problems in their children, including birth deformities and cancer, as well as neuropsychiatric conditions such as autism and schizophrenia.

In the study, the researchers analyzed data from intelligence tests taken by 33,437 children who were born between 1959 and 1965 in the United States.

The children were tested at 8 months, 4 years and 7 years and were assessed for their sensory discrimination, hand-eye coordination, reading, spelling and arithmetic ability.

They found that the older the father, the more likely the child would have lower scores on the various tests.

In contrast, the older the mother, the higher the scores of the child in the cognitive tests.

"Previous researchers have suggested that the children of older mothers may perform better because they experience a more nurturing home environment; if this is the case, this study suggests that children of older fathers do not necessarily experience the same benefit," the researchers wrote in a statement.

The researchers said the lower scores obtained by offspring of older men may have to do with mutation.

"Unlike a woman's eggs which are formed when she herself is in the womb, a man's sperm accumulates over his lifetime, which previous studies have suggested can mean increased incidence of mutations in the sperm at an older age," they wrote.

Reuters

Ooze gonna save us?

Warning! Eating books could seriously damage your health

Stop. Go and check your bookcases. Are there any children's books that were published before 1985? Maybe a bit of Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton, or even a copy of The Very, Very, Very Long Dog? Well, put on some gloves and remove them immediately, because those things could be lethal. Don't burn them though – that might release poisons into the air. Don't bury them either, that could pollute an aquifer. In fact, I'm not sure what you should do. Ah, that's it! Panic.

You think I'm joking. But apparently the US government believes that these old publications might give children brain damage. You see, prior to 1985, many books were printed with inks and paints that used lead pigments. Last year, following the Chinese "killer toy" scandal, Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, imposing strict limits on the amount of lead permitted in anything intended for use by children aged 12 and under, from toys to bikes to books. The law was retroactive and came into force on 10 February, and now – according to Walter Olson, an expert in American legal lunacy – anyone who tries to peddle old books for kids containing lead may be in serious trouble: "Penalties … can include $100,000 fines and prison time, regardless of whether any child is harmed."

Now, you might object that a child would have to eat a great many copies of the Partridge Family Special 1972 before enough lead was in his or her bloodstream to do any damage. And you'd be right, as there has never been a case of a child killed, wounded or mentally impaired by exposure to a browning reproduction of David Cassidy's face. However, mere facts rarely have much force against the juggernaut of ill-thought-out laws rushed through in a blur of media hype. And although the American Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has stated that it will hold off on enforcing the law until February 2010, Olson reveals that it has nevertheless issued guidelines instructing thrift stores and anyone selling second-hand children's goods – including books – manufactured in the Age of Lead that they may only sell them after they have paid for expensive tests proving the items are lead free. As a result, many charity shops and second-hand bookstores have started removing all old children's books from their shelves while refusing new donations, from fear that this stay of execution is only temporary. For, living as they do in the land of puppy-eating, baby-disemboweling litigators, they know full well that they will lose their homes, cars and underpants if subsequently found guilty of selling an illegal copy of Cat in the Hat to a minor.

Of course, this pencils-up-the-nose, forehead-slapping "I'm mad, me" stupidity has many negative consequences: traders' livelihoods are threatened; poor people lose access to a source of cheap literature for their kids; libraries may be forced to undertake expensive restocking, while out-of-print books will be lost forever (although an exception has been made for rarities, so long as they are sold for adult use only). The American Library Association actually warned Congress that the law was a bit shoddy but were ignored. Now according to Olson the ALA:

"… apparently intends to take the position that the law does not apply to libraries unless it hears otherwise."

However he goes on to explain that they may not prevail as:

"… the law bans the 'distribution' of forbidden items, whether or not for profit. In addition, most libraries regularly raise money through book sales, and will now need to consider excluding older children's titles from those sales. One CPSC commissioner, Thomas Moore, has already called for libraries to 'sequester' some undefinedly large fraction of pre-1985 books until more is known about their risks."

Quite a card, that Thomas Moore, eh? Thus a great many books could very soon become inaccessible. Even when they survive on private shelves, it is technically illegal to pass them on for free. And on top of all that, the law is incoherent: what's to stop a child from being exposed to books for adults published prior to 1985? Why not ban them all? Though I probably shouldn't even say that. The idea of banning books as a health hazard would be all too popular with those politicians who are opposed to freedom of speech, but too mealy-mouthed to come out and say it.

The mass destruction of books is another step on from Book TV, so that's a job well done for the members of the US Congress, busy as they are with a $787bn stimulus package that's going to prevent economic apocalypse. Not that any of them read that all the way through, either.

The Guardian

Primeiros Passinhos / First Steps

Mesmo, mesmo, à séria ;)

Um bebé Equidna, meu Deus / A Baby Echidna, my God

From Spook's LiveJournal gallery, thank you :)

Babies are the Root of our Social Cohesion

Foto Mawalien

A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or overhaul the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go, nothing can beat a happily babbling baby. A baby is born knowing how to work the crowd. A toothless smile here, a musical squeal there, and even hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the head and weak in the knees.

In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine.

As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding,” which will be published by Harvard University Press in April, human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.

Human beings evolved as cooperative breeders, says Dr. Hrdy, a reproductive strategy in which mothers are assisted by as-if mothers, or “allomothers,” individuals of either sex who help care for and feed the young. Most biologists would concur that humans have evolved the need for shared child care, but Dr. Hrdy takes it a step further, arguing that our status as cooperative breeders, rather than our exceptionally complex brains, helps explain many aspects of our temperament. Our relative pacifism, for example, or the expectation that we can fly from New York to Los Angeles without fear of personal dismemberment. Chimpanzees are pretty smart, but were you to board an airplane filled with chimpanzees, you “would be lucky to disembark with all 10 fingers and toes still attached,” Dr. Hrdy writes.

Our capacity to cooperate in groups, to empathize with others and to wonder what others are thinking and feeling — all these traits, Dr. Hrdy argues, probably arose in response to the selective pressures of being in a cooperatively breeding social group, and the need to trust and rely on others and be deemed trustworthy and reliable in turn. Babies became adorable and keen to make connections with every passing adult gaze. Mothers became willing to play pass the baby. Dr. Hrdy points out that mother chimpanzees and gorillas jealously hold on to their infants for the first six months or more of life. Other females may express real interest in the newborn, but the mother does not let go: you never know when one of those females will turn infanticidal, or be unwilling or unable to defend the young ape against an infanticidal male.

By contrast, human mothers in virtually every culture studied allow others to hold their babies from birth onward, to a greater or lesser extent depending on tradition. Among the !Kung foragers of the Kalahari, babies are held by a father, grandmother, older sibling or some other allomother maybe 25 percent of the time. Among the Efe foragers of Central Africa, babies spend 60 percent of their daylight hours being toted around by somebody other than their mother. In 87 percent of foraging societies, mothers sometimes suckle each other’s children, another remarkable display of social trust.

Dr. Hrdy wrote her book in part to counter what she sees as the reigning dogma among evolutionary scholars that humans evolved their extreme sociality and cooperative behavior to better compete with other humans. “I’m not comfortable accepting this idea that the origins of hypersociality can be found in warfare, or that in-group amity arose in the interest of out-group enmity,” she said in a telephone interview. Sure, humans have been notably violent and militaristic for the last 12,000 or so years, she said, when hunter-gatherers started settling down and defending territories, and populations started getting seriously dense. But before then? There weren’t enough people around to wage wars. By the latest estimates, the average population size during the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded the Neolithic Age may have been around 2,000 breeding adults. “What would humans have been fighting over?” Dr. Hrdy said. “They were too busy trying to keep themselves and their children alive.”

Dr. Hrdy also argues that our human ancestors became emotionally modern long before the human brain had reached its current average volume of 1,300 cubic centimeters, which is about three times the size of a chimpanzee brain — in other words, that we became the nicest apes before becoming the smartest. You don’t need a bulging brain to evolve cooperative breeding. Many species of birds breed cooperatively, as do lions, rats, meerkats, wolves and marmosets, among others. But to become a cooperatively breeding ape, and to persuade a bunch of smart, hot-tempered, suspicious, politically cunning primates to start sharing child care and provisionings, now that took a novel evolutionary development, the advent of this thing called trust.

To explain the rise of cooperative breeding among our forebears, Dr. Hrdy synthesizes an array of new research in anthropology, genetics, infant development, comparative biology. She notes that recent research has overturned the longstanding insistence that humans are a patrilocal species, that is, with women moving away from their birth families to join their husbands. Instead, it seems that young mothers in many traditional societies have their own mothers and other female relatives close at hand, and who better to trust with baby care than your mom or your aunt? New studies have also shown the importance of postmenopausal women to gathering roots and tubers, the sort of unsexy foods that are difficult to disinter and lack the succulent status of, say, a freshly killed oryx, but that just may help feed the kids in hard times. Other anthropologists have made the startling discovery that children have entertainment value, and that among traditional cultures without television or Internet access, a bobble-headed baby is the best show in town.

However cooperative breeding got started, its impact on human evolution was profound. With helpers in the nest, women could give birth to offspring with ever longer childhoods — the better to build big brains and stout immune systems — and, paradoxically, at ever shrinking intervals. The average time between births for a chimpanzee mother is about six years; for a human mother, it’s two or three years. As a result of our combined braininess and fecundity, humans have managed to colonize the planet; exploit, marginalize or exterminate all competing forms of life; build a vast military-industrial complex all under the auspices of Bernard Madoff and with one yeti of a carbon footprint, and will somebody please hand me that baby before it’s too late.

The NY Times