祖母的重要

t, who in the 1920's studied the Tiwi hunter-gatherers of Australia, described the elder females there as "a terrible nuisance" and "physically quite revolting" and in whose company he was distressed to find himself on occasion, yet whose activities did not merit recording or analyzing with anything like the attention he paid the men, the young women, even the children.

   
祖母的重要(第2页) 　
But for a growing number of evolutionary biologists and cultural anthropologists, grandmothers represent a key to understanding human prehistory, and the particulars of why we are as we are — slow to grow up and start breeding but remarkably fruitful once we get there, empathetic and generous as animals go, and family-focused to a degree hardly seen elsewhere in the primate order.
As a result, biologists, evolutionary anthropologists, sociologists and demographers are starting to pay more attention to grandmothers: what they did in the past, whether and how they made a difference to their families' welfare, and what they are up to now in a sampling of cultures around the world.
论文祖母的重要(第2页)来自

At a recent international conference — the first devoted to grandmothers — researchers concluded with something approaching a consensus that grandmothers in particular, and elder female kin in general, have been an underrated source of power and sway in our evolutionary heritage. Grandmothers, they said, are in a distinctive evolutionary category. They are no longer reproductively active themselves, as older males may struggle to be, but they often have many hale years ahead of them; and as the existence of substantial proportions of older adults among even the most "primitive" cultures indicates, such durability is nothing new.
If, over the span of human evolution, postmenopausal women have not been using their stalwart bodies for bearing babies, they very likely have been directing their considerable energies elsewhere.
S

《祖母的重要(第2页)》