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The origin of the family has been under discussion in modern paleoanthropology for several decades (see, e.g., Washburn and Lancaster; Lovejoy). This paper will suggest how the family became a critical adaptation for our ancestors at least one hundred thousand years ago. I define the family as consisting in a female, her offspring, and an adult male—who is of course the “father” to whom the title of this paper refers (see Brown 135, 136; Rodseth et al. 229). More specifically, the adults are sexual partners and they share goods and services. The female provides direct care for the dependent young. The male may also do this, or he may do so indirectly through caring for the mother.
Many of the suggestions I will make can be challenged with plausible contrasting claims.2 But informed inferences must be ventured in studying human origins lest our understanding of these matters be immobilized by what David Nisbet calls sandheap empiricism. Most of my data will come from excellent studies, in the wild, of the chimpanzee by Goodall and of the bonobo by Kano. This is not to say that their findings apply with equal validity to all chimp and bonobo groups—and much is yet to be learned, especially about bonobos. But of the more recent work on these species I find these two studies to be the most thorough (see, e.g., Susman).3 For our purposes, such studies provide what might be called a “sideview” of human evolution which can supplement information derived from paleoanthropology, evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis, and so forth. In general, I will hold that the family evolved in a shifting, disjunctive way, with innumerable false starts, hedged bets, failures, and small, sometimes isolated breakthroughs. Hence, I make two basic assumptions: that the family evolved gradually and that any brand of monocausality in identifying its origin and development is mistaken.
With an appreciation for this flux in mind, let me describe three major tenets of my positio