A recent New York Times editorial reports that “scientists have created baby monkeys with a father and two mothers.” The author of the article, Adam Cohen, considers this “a futuristic twist” to the existing mess concerning the legal status of parenthood when surrogates and DNA manipulation are involved. Cohen wonders, “Could a baby one day have 100 parents?”

Although this certainly seems like a futuristic scenario, dispersed parenthood is more likely  an echo of our pre-agricultural past, still reflected in the practices of some modern-day hunter gatherers.

In her wonderful book, Mother Nature, Sarah Hrdy reports that when anthropologist "Kim Hill asked the Aché who their fathers were, he found he needed to expand his terminology. Three hundred and twenty-one Aché listed a total of 632 fathers.”

How the hell does that happen? Well, the Aché don’t have the purely biological conception of fatherhood we take for granted today. Hrdy explains that, “the Aché have a word, miare, for ‘the father who put it in’; peroare, for ‘the men who mixed it’; momboare, for ‘the ones who spilled it out’; and bykuare, for ‘the fathers who provided the child’s essence.’”

The Aché, like many preagricultural societies, believe a child can have several fathers – literally.

Anthropologists Stephen Beckerman and Paul Valentine edited a book about this phenomenon, which they call “partible paternity.” Cultures of Multiple Fathers contains anthropologists’ reports on this understanding of procreation from many societies in the Amazon basin who have had no contact with one another or any common language – strongly suggesting that partible paternity arose independently in various places and times.