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This week, I’m honored to share a conversation I had with Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist whose work has powerfully shifted the way we understand what it means to be human.
Sarah invites us to look at the myths surrounding maternal instinct and what society deems "natural” and to imagine something more truthful and compassionate. We explore the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, not as some primitive past, but as a mirror that reflects what we still need today, that is…connection, cooperation, and shared care.
In this episode, we talk about the vital role of alloparents, those who care for children that aren’t their own. These relationships, Sarah reminds us, are not exceptions but part of an ancient, resilient design that helped our species survive.
The insights she offers personally moved me deeply, like adoptive mothers produce the same love-anchored hormones as biological ones, and that today’s girls are reaching puberty far earlier than ever before, raising questions that touch both science and the heart of our culture.
This conversation is a gentle unraveling of assumptions and a return to what’s most human in all of us. Perhaps the most striking takeaway from this discussion was that Sarah explains there was a time when only 12,000 breeding humans walked the Earth. Life was unimaginably harsh yet from that period of immense hardship, came our greatest strength as a species: flexibility, cooperation, and care.
Her observations as a primatologist and anthropologist made me realize that the challenges we face today aren’t modern at all. And the solutions may not be found in using technology, but rather, in re-centering the social structures that have always sustained us as human beings.
Sarah’s warmth, intellect, and fierce curiosity shine through every word she shares. Her work is a reminder that if we want families to thrive, then we really need support to be front and center within our culture. This conversation left me feeling more hopeful than I’ve felt in a long time… and I’m deeply grateful to share it with you here.
*Correction: In the interview, Sarah Hrdy would like to clarify two points. First, the Pleistocene epoch is now widely recognized to have begun approximately 2.6 million years ago, not 1.8 million years ago as stated. Second, in reference to matrilineal societies, the correct figure is that approximately 15 percent of known societies worldwide have been matrilineal, not 15 individual societies. These matrilineal societies were also commonly matrilocal first, with women remaining in or near their natal communities.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is an anthropologist and primatologist whose work has significantly influenced evolutionary psychology and maternal behavior. Her research on primate behavior and human evolution has provided profound insights into the biological and social underpinnings of maternal instincts, gender roles, and reproductive strategies. Hrdy’s theories have challenged traditional views and opened new avenues for understanding human behavior from an evolutionary standpoint.
You can listen to Sarah’s TED Talk: Are we still human if robots help raise our babies?
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2:32 Maternal instinct and environmental factors
6:53 Alloparenting and networks
14:34 The costs and difficulty of birth, from apes to humans
23:18 Bonding for humans versus animals
26:38 Placentas: to eat or not to eat?
31:24 Impact of environment on the autonomic nervous system and fertility rates
35:19 The organizational structures that matrilineal and patrilineal societies create
41:22 The costly nature of human brain development
44:46 From a collective cmmunity of civic-mindedness to a community of domineering
50:05 Citrona farms
55:10 Leisure, play, and creativity in primates
57:22 Men are fully capable of caring for babies safely and independently, and often do.
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