I&#x27;m pretty sure that if our cave-man ancestors raised children the way we do, humanity would have either have gone extinct or babies would be way less annoying[1] thanks to evolutionary selection. There&#x27;s no way a huge percentage of stone age babies wouldn&#x27;t have been shaken to death or hurled off cliffs at 2am otherwise. I&#x27;m sure some were anyway, but it&#x27;d have been <i>most of them</i>.<p>It <i>had</i> to have been a more collective effort than it is now, with a greater relief from work for those involved in the caretaking than we enjoy. It must have been both, because even a single dedicated stay-at-home caretaker will go nuts without support&#x2F;relief, and the typical working partner <i>does not</i> have the capacity to properly provide that at night <i>and</i> not be really, really messed up during the day.<p>[1] I write this as a parent of two. Hospitals bombard new parents with &quot;don&#x27;t shake your baby&quot; educational material. They do this because babies are <i>phenomenally</i> shakeable things, especially when they&#x27;re shrieking for no damn reason at 2am and you&#x27;re so tired from days on end of terrible sleep that you&#x27;re beginning to hallucinate.