![Newage Mothers Rely on Their Older Children to Help Raise Younger Ones Newage Mothers Rely on Their Older Children to Help Raise Younger Ones](https://images.medindia.net/health-images/1200_1000/Importance-of-Parent.jpg)
The team found that early in that transition, it was a mother’s older children who helped to raise her younger children and only with more modern life histories did mothers also need the cooperation of other adults.
"This suggests that early human families may have formed around cooperating groups of mothers and children," said University of Utah anthropologist Karen Kramer. "We simulated an economic problem that would have arisen over the course of human evolution. As mothers became more successful at producing children, they also had more dependents than they could care for on their own," Kramer pointed out.
Before the transition, according to Kramer, mothers likely nursed children until the age of five to six, did not nutritionally support children after weaning and received no help in raising the children.
"Human mothers are interesting. They are unlike mothers of many other species because they feed their children after weaning and others help them raise their children," Kramer noted.
Deep in the past, mothers likely received no help and consequently had much lower rates of fertility and lost many children.
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But this was not always the case, the authors concluded.
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Most earlier hypotheses by other anthropologists about who helped mothers in ancient societies point to other adults.
The findings appeared in the Journal of Human Evolution.
Source-IANS