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C a s a l – L o v e n o t w a r 147beluga, Risso, sperm, humpback and fin whales) are known to have spindleneurons like us.Maternal investment: the linksWhat is the relationship between these remarkable facts? Biologists do nothave a collective name for all mammalian persons, which can give us a clue.My suggestion is that a huge maternal investment is essential tounderstanding these species and civilisation itself. It requires largequantities of oxytocin, causing maternal love, empathy, altruism, and thepatience required for cultural transmission.Females’ lesser strength and far larger nutritional needs resulting fromprolonged pregnancies, lactation and infant nutritional dependency imposea greater need to resort to technological innovation. And if we take the mostphotographed examples of tool use, we see that it is overwhelmingly femalechimps that practice the arts of termite fishing or sweeping; female gorillasthat measure the depth of rivers with a stick, and female dolphins thatmanipulate air rings or use sponges to protect their noses while feeding.Female chimps would not kill a monkey even when hungry – whilst malesterrorise them and kill them for fun – and so had to develop variousnutrition-improving techniques, essential to female reproductive success.For whilst males’ reproductive success depends on access to females,female´s success depends on access to food. As a result, while males aremore likely to obsess with sex and power, females focus on offspring andnutrition (Emlen & Oring 1977). Wrangham (2009) argues that female foodpreparation is the key to both our anatomical and cultural evolution.Females not only invent new ways of obtaining and preparing food, butare the ones that teach those techniques to their offspring. Female chimpseven develop teaching techniques, dividing tasks into exercises the youngrepeat (Boesch 1991). Language is extremely useful to educate the young aswell as to protect them from skull-smashing through alliance-building. It is,then, unsurprising that females learn to speak earlier, talk faster, talk more,and derive more political and health benefits from conversation (Brizendine,2006: 62ff, Dunbar 2010: 73ff) or that motherese is thought to be the origin oflanguage and music (Falk 2009). Mother-infant constant communicationprovides the reassurance required for sanity, the security required forimmediate survival and the intensive education required for long-termsurvival and cultural transmission.Since such a high level of investment is worthwhile only if individualssurvive long after education is complete, all mammalian persons are longlived.The role of spindle neurons is not yet well-understood but we know