I'm Alan Olver and this is Clear In Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

I like to think about children because while I was writing this book I had two, as sort

of bottomless pits of need, but we have a secret weapon that no other species has, which

is a highly suspicious invention, totally, totally weird, and that is grandmas is called the

grandmother hypothesis. And it's this idea that grandmothers are essential to basically

upping the investment in our super, super needy babies.

That's Brenna Hasett. The book she's written is called Growing Up Human, and it's a lively and

often very funny take on one of the most unappreciated traits that make us humans different from

all other animals. It's our extraordinarily long childhood. Brenna joined me for a conversation

from London, where she's a researcher at University College London's Institute of Archaeology.

So you have this way of introducing insight into our childhoods, something we all share,

but by comparing it to how we got this way through the evolutionary process, it really throws

it into a new perspective, I think. Oh, thanks. I mean, I hope so. It's one of my pet peeves that

we talk a lot about the evolution of things like man, the hunter, or fire, or tools. But some of the

things that I think are actually incredibly important for our species get kind of overlooked,

despite the fact that the only way we get more of our species is by having children.

And the way we care for our children is one of the ways in which you apply, as far as I can tell,

you apply the technical term, weirdness. We're weird compared to other animals. What makes us weird?

Oh, we are so weird. And I mean, it starts at the beginning and it just goes on.

So, I like to think of the weirdness as really starting before any individual child is actually

born. We're really weird as animals because we do this thing called pair bonding. And the rest

of the animal kingdom has decided that that's just a waste of resources. Why would you pair off

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