Maropeng celebrates first mums on Mother’s Day

On 11 May we celebrated Mother’s Day, a loving tribute to the woman we call “Mom”.

At Maropeng they honour the palaeoanthropolgical evolution of motherhood, and recognise the role early mothering played in the preservation of humankind.

According to Lindsay Marshall, Maropeng’s marketing and communications manager, the 2009 discovery of Australopithecus sediba fossils (MH1 and MH2) at Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site was not only of vital importance in terms of piecing together the evidence for human evolution, it also served as a primitive reminder of the bond between mother and child.

While research is still under way, Marshall says according to scientists, the fossil evidence reveals a young child and its mother who died together almost two million years ago.

According to Dr Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who is hailed as the leading scientific authority on motherhood and is the author of Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, this is roughly the time period when early hominid mothers started accepting help from others in child-rearing. And, as it turns out, this seemingly obvious practice was an essential part of our evolution and survival.

Dr Hrdy explains how a small behavioural change by our early ancestral mothers – that of allowing others to help taking care of their young – was responsible for the evolution of some of the signature attributes of humans including empathy, cooperation and even our large brains.

Hrdy points out that hominid populations remained small for much of the Pleistocene era (roughly 1,8 million to 12 000 years ago), because of the high fatality rate of their young.

“It has been only in the last 15 years that we’ve started to look at what it takes in a hunter-gatherer context to keep children alive. What we’re learning highlights the importance, not just of mothers or parents, but also of all parents – group members other than the genetic mother and father – grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins and older siblings,” says Hrdy.

She emphasises her excitement about the research stating, “There was just so much emphasis on hunting and warfare that we overlooked how important child-rearing was. After all, in evolutionary terms, offspring survival is where the rubber hits the road.”