Anthropology Colloquium

About the event

The Department of Anthropology is proud to present Professor Daniel Sellen from the University of Toronto. Dr. Sellen will present a colloquium in EME B46. The tile of his talk is "Feeding and Caring for Infants and Young Children: New tools for supporting ancient needs."

In this talk, Professor Sellen asks “what is the relevance of the evolved vulnerabilities of infants and young children, and the evolved flexibility of human caregivers, to efforts to be “innovative” in reducing global child health disparities?” He argues that evolutionary, anthropological and ethnographic evidence suggests that humans evolved a cooperative and flexible strategy for feeding young, and that complementary feeding is a unique adaptation intimately linked to changes in diet, life history and sociality since the last common ancestor with apes. He further argues that human physiological, behavioral, social and technological flexibility has also created potential for unhealthy feeding practices, likely always present among foragers but possibly more prevalent in contemporary communities lacking access to knowledge and material resources due to social disparities. Proposed is a synthesis of previous work by many anthropologists and clinicians into a model of an evolving “human early care package”, of which specific types of feeding practices may be an integral and essential component. The talk ends with some examples of how new social technologies may offer exciting opportunities to augment the breastfeeding and complementary feeding components of the human care package to support the healthiest infant and young child feeding practices.