This was the fucking thesis of my OP, which you've already spent time arguing with - for what, if you agree? Her thesis is that men are inherently drawn to things larger than domesticity -that this is some sort of noble destiny which they ought to be allowed to follow, not constrained by responsibility to women and children, which is BS outside of the paradigm of patriarchy. Patriarchy teaches them that - it is not biological as you well know from personal experience. AMABs have been socialized as male inside of a patriarchy. Duh!
Yes, nearly all anthropologists would make the broad assertion that men in foraging bands spend way more time than men in Western cultures - nourishing, caregiving, and raising children. I've already quoted to you from a noted anthropologist on this. Here's another description of a photo of babies being held and played with by male alloparents.
"Most visiting anthropologists surveying this spirited four-way interaction would assume that the two adult Trobrianders are fathers and the infants they hold are their offspring. In fact, as Eibl-Eibesfeldt notes, both men are alloparents. As the man on the right initiates a greeting by urging the infants to shake hands, the more extroverted ten-month-old looks eagerly at his fellow, smiles, and opens his mouth wide with excitement. The six-month-old looks first to the initiating alloparent, then at the other infant, then over at his nearby father, shrinks back a bit, shakes hands, but then timidly pulls his hand back and nestles closer to the alloparent, who seems to be enjoying this quintessentially human comedy of manners very much."
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mothers and Others (p. 142). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
Of course, there are variables between bands, but the fact remains that compared to Western dads who spend about an hour a day with infants, hunter-gatherer dads are much, much more involved and hands-on with their children. They also care a whole lot less about gender roles, so there's that as well. There will be defined roles for men and for women, and then in keeping with the adamant individualism that characterizes forager peoples, they will readily ignore them if it suits them.
Forager dads are not only at home more, but they are more involved in the care of their children because in these societies, everyone is involved in the care of everyone else. Nuclear families have little meaning and alloparenting (which includes not just female relatives) is the overwhelming child-rearing strategy.
She said, "Our civilization is built by men marching off towards horizons, leaving families behind." and you said that she made an "excellent response." That's where my question comes about WTF is wrong with you in supporting the abandonment of offspring as natural and inevitable - because that's what she was purporting and you agreed with it.
This is my area of expertise, so I'm going to stop arguing with you about it. And no, the social configurations of whales are not in the slightest way relevant to the social configurations of human beings which are completely and totally different in absolutely every way imaginable. Even the habits of our closest primate relatives are not an exact match for ours. For more on that, read this:
Cooperative alloparental care is what allowed a rag-tag bunch of 10,000 or fewer breeding adults who left Africa about 100,000 years ago to keep themselves and their slowly maturing offspring alive. However, the downside of this system is if early hominids perceived that they did not have alloparental support, maternal commitment was low and new mothers might well abandon their young.
With the exception of callitrichids (tamarinds and marmosets) who also produce closely spaced offspring that exceed their ability to care for them alone, humans are the only primates who initially show such a contingent investment in their children. “When prospects for support seem poor, mothers in both groups are more likely to bail out (i.e., leave their offspring to die) than other primates are.”
