Another characteristic of our landscape is its exquisite moderation. It looks like the result of one of those happy compromises that make our social and political plans so irrational and yet so successful. It has been born of a compromise between wilderness and tameness, Between Nature and Man. In many countries you pass straight from regions where men have left their mark in every inch of ground to other regions that are desolate wilderness. Abroad, we have all notice how abruptly most of the cities seem to begin; here, no city; there, the city. With us the cities pre tend they are not really there until we arc well inside them. They almost insinuate themselves into the countryside. This comes from another com promise of ours, the suburb. There is a great deal to be said for the suburb. To people of moderate means, compelled to live fairly near their work in a city, the suburb offers the most civilized way of life. Nearly all Englishmen are at heart country gentlemen. The suburban villa enables the salesman or the clerk, out of hours, to be a country gentleman. A man in a man in a suburb feels that he has one foot in the city and one in the country. As this is the kind of compromise he likes, he is happy.

As a result, biologists, evolutionary anthropologists, sociologists and demographers are starting to pay more attention to grandmothers: what they did in the past, whether and how they made a difference to their families’ welfare, and what they are up to now in a sampling of cultures around the world.At a recent international conference —the first devoted to grandmothers —researchers concluded with something approaching a consensus that grandmothers in particular, and elder female kin in general, have been an underrated source of power and sway in our evolutionary heritage. Grandmothers, they said, are in a distinctive evolutionary category. They are no longer reproductively active themselves, as older males may struggle to be, but they often have many hale years ahead of them; and as the existence of substantial proportions of older adults among even the most "primitive" cultures indicates, such durability is nothing new.
If, over the span of human evolution, postmenopausal women have not been using their Stalwart bodies for bearing babies, they very likely have been directing their considerable energies elsewhere.
Say, over the river and through the woods. It turns out that there is a reason children are perpetually yearning for the flourdusted, mythical figure called grandma or granny or oma or abuelita. As a number of participants at the conference demonstrated, the presence or absence of a grandmother often spelled the difference in traditional subsistence cultures between life or death for the grandchildren. In fact, having a grandmother around sometimes improved a child’s prospects to a far greater extent than did the presence of a father.
Dr. Ruth Mace and Dr. Rebecca Sear of the department of anthropology at University College in London, for example, analyzed demographic information from rural Gambia that was collected from 1950 to 1974, when child mortality rates in the area were so high that even minor discrepancies in care could be all too readily tallied. The anthropologists found that for Gambian toddlers, weaned from the protective balm of breast milk but not yet possessing strength and immune vigor of their own, the presence of a grandmother cut their chances of dying in half.
"The surprising result to us was that if the father was alive or dead didn’t matter," Dr. Mace said in a telephone interview. "If the grandmother dies, you notice it; if the father does, you don’t."
Importantly, this beneficent granny effect derived only from maternal grandmothers —the mother of one’s mother. The paternal grandmothers made no difference to a child’s outcome.