Breastfeeding over two years is associated with longer birth intervals, but not measures of growth or health, among children in <scp>K</scp>ilimanjaro, <scp>TZ</scp>

Mattison, Siobhán M.; Wander, Katherine; Hinde, Katie

doi:10.1002/ajhb.22729

Cited by 12 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 80 publications

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“…Therefore, four dams became pregnant while nursing. Nursing has well‐known effects on inter‐birth intervals, and both suckling intensity and maternal energy balance have been implicated as proximate mechanisms [Mattison et al, ; Rosetta et al, ; Thompson et al, ; Valeggia & Ellison, ; Wilson et al, ; Wilson, ]. In the present study, nursing does not inhibit a mother's ability to conceive during the next available opportunity, supporting the latter hypothesis: that energy balance is a crucial variable in permitting or inhibiting conception.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Inter‐individual variation in weaning among rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta): Serum stable isotope indicators of suckling duration and lactation

Reitsema

Partrick

Muir

2015

American J Primatol

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Weaning is a transition in early development with major implications for infant survival and well-being, and for maternal lifetime reproductive success. The particular strategy a primate mother adopts in rearing her offspring represents a negotiation between her ability to invest and her need to invest, and can be considered adaptive and influenced by biological and social factors. Any investigation into how and why maternal weaning strategies differ among non-human primates is limited by the precision of the measurement tool used to assess infants' weaning ages. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of soft tissues (e.g., hair, nails, feces, urine, blood) offers an objective means of monitoring the weaning status of infants. In this study, we assess stable isotope ratios in blood serum from 14 captive rhesus macaque dyads (Macaca mulatta) at infant ages 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 10 months to estimate the timing of weaning events. Male infants wean earlier than female infants. Infants with the lowest birth weights wean latest. Most infants wean upon reaching 2.5 times their birth weights, sooner than when weaning elsewhere has been predicted for captive cercopithecine primates. The longest weaning periods (ca. 10 months) are observed among infants of small mothers. The shortest weaning period, between 2 and 5 months, was among the lowest ranking dyad. Parity and mothers' ages had no discernible effect on the timing of weaning events. The stable carbon and nitrogen isotope values of dams during lactation are significantly different than those of a non-lactating adult female outgroup, raising questions about the suitability and selection of adult comparative baselines in studies where lactating mothers cannot be sampled longitudinally (e.g., bioarchaeology; paleontology). Am. J. Primatol. 78:1113-1134, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 77%

Inter‐individual variation in weaning among rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta): Serum stable isotope indicators of suckling duration and lactation

Reitsema

Partrick

Muir

2015

American J Primatol

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“…We constructed regression models to evaluate milk parameters and infant characteristics on outcome measures using Akaike′s information criterion (AIC) to avoid overfitting models (Akaike, 1974). AIC model selection processes retain predictors within the model that appreciably contribute to explaining the phenomena of outcome measures independent of conventional and arbitrary thresholds of significance (Mattison, Wander, & Hinde, 2015). Initial models included average milk cortisol and average milk yield value in the first postnatal month (continuous parameter), infant sex (nominal parameter), and birth cohort 2013–2015 (ordinal parameter).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cortisol in Neonatal Mother's Milk Predicts Later Infant Social and Cognitive Functioning in Rhesus Monkeys

et al. 2017

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Milk provides not only the building blocks for somatic development but also the hormonal signals that contribute to the biopsychological organization of the infant. Among mammals, glucocorticoids (GCs) in mother's milk have been associated with infant temperament. This study extended prior work to investigate rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) mother-infant dyads (N = 34) from birth through 8 months postpartum. Regression analysis revealed that cortisol concentrations in milk during the neonatal period predicted impulsivity on a cognitive task, but not global social behaviors, months later. During this time period, sex-differentiated social behavior emerged. For female infants, milk cortisol concentrations predicted total frequency of play. Collectively, these findings support and extend the "lactational programming" hypothesis on the impact of maternal-origin hormones ingested via milk.

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“…The use of large secondary datasets comes with challenges over and above those of analyzing primary datasets, which will require theoretical, as well as methodological, sophistication: for example, in order to design appropriate analyses for hypothesis-testing given large numbers of potential variables which could be included; and to understand the limited use of p-values in contexts where many findings will be significant, but essentially meaningless (see Stulp et al Parts I and II, this issue for further discussion). Model-selection approaches (Towner and Luttbeg 2007) are increasingly used to overcome some of these difficulties (e.g., Shenk et al 2013;Mattison, Wander, and Hinde 2015;Borgerhoff Mulder and Beheim 2011), although often misunderstood by reviewers in our experience, such that increased training in their use may be warranted. Theory that explicitly incorporates the links between biological and cultural fitness (e.g., Boyd and Richerson 1985;Feldman and Laland 1996) will also prove useful, especially as empirical tests of these theories remain relatively limited, as do explicit tests incorporating contrasting predictions (cf.…”

Section: The Way Forward Is Not To Throw Backmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modernizing Evolutionary Anthropology

Mattison

Sear

2016

Hum Nat

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Evolutionary anthropology has traditionally focused on the study of small-scale, largely self-sufficient societies. The increasing rarity of these societies underscores the importance of such research yet also suggests the need to understand the processes by which such societies are being lost-what we call "modernization"-and the effects of these processes on human behavior and biology. In this article, we discuss recent efforts by evolutionary anthropologists to incorporate modernization into their research and the challenges and rewards that follow. Advantages include that these studies allow for explicit testing of hypotheses that explore how behavior and biology change in conjunction with changes in social, economic, and ecological factors. In addition, modernization often provides a source of "natural experiments" since it may proceed in a piecemeal fashion through a population. Challenges arise, however, in association with reduced variability in fitness proxies such as fertility, and with the increasing use of relatively novel methodologies in evolutionary anthropology, such as the analysis of secondary data. Confronting these challenges will require careful consideration but will lead to an improved understanding of humanity. We conclude that the study of modernization offers the prospect of developing a richer evolutionary anthropology, by encompassing ultimate and proximate explanations for behavior expressed across the full range of human societies.

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Breastfeeding over two years is associated with longer birth intervals, but not measures of growth or health, among children in Kilimanjaro, TZ

Cited by 12 publications

References 80 publications

Inter‐individual variation in weaning among rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta): Serum stable isotope indicators of suckling duration and lactation

Inter‐individual variation in weaning among rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta): Serum stable isotope indicators of suckling duration and lactation

Cortisol in Neonatal Mother's Milk Predicts Later Infant Social and Cognitive Functioning in Rhesus Monkeys

Modernizing Evolutionary Anthropology

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