When evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy became a grandmother in 2014, she witnessed a phenomenon she never expected to see, one that seemed to run counter to everything she assumed about the division of labor between fathers and mothers. Rather than a protective, if aloof, presence in the baby’s life, David — Hrdy’s son-in-law — was immersed in the nurturing process.

“Watching him, I marveled at the sight of ‘Man the Hunter’ at a bassinet and was suffused with gratitude,” recalls Hrdy, a professor emerita of anthropology. “As my mind traveled back over the infant care I had seen before, I was also struck by its strangeness. This was completely new to me. ‘Wonderful!’ mused the mother and grandmother in me. Then the evolutionary anthropologist in me intervened. ‘How could this be happening?’”

That question was the catalyst that led to Hrdy’s new book Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies (Princeton University Press). A comprehensive and wide-ranging work, the book traces Hrdy’s personal investigation into the deep history of male care, beginning with the very first caretakers, male ones among fish over 400 million years ago, through eons of mammalian and primate evolution, and including several thousand years of historical changes across cultures through time leading to this novel 21st century situation. 

Hrdy proposes that 21st-century trends in fatherhood aren’t just informed by society’s changing views of masculinity. They are biologically ancient proclivities, ones that have long been present, albeit lying latent, in the brains of modern man. They’re just awaiting activation. 

Access the book at The Princeton University Press