It names the Aka Pygmies, a hunter-gatherer tribe from the northern Congo, as the best fathers. When the mother is not available, the father calms his baby by giving him or her a nipple to suck.

Aka Pygmy men do more in the way of childcare than fathers in any other society, according to the FatherWorld report, published today by Fathers Direct, a British charity.

Aka fathers may hold their baby close to their bodies for a couple of hours at a time, according to Barry Hewlett, an American anthropologist who has studied the tribe for more than 20 years.

On average, Aka fathers hold or are within reach of their infants 47 per cent of the time. They beat Swedish fathers, who are number one in the developed world, and who, on average, do 45 per cent of parental childcare.

British fathers are the fourth-most involved in the West, and do a third of parental childcare, according to the report, which is based on a review of existing research literature.

Caroline Flint, the former president of the Royal College of Midwives, said that she had come across many examples of men in Britain “suckling” their babies, even though it might not be something they talked about very much.

She said: “It’s not a case of the man saying to the baby, ‘Here you are, have my booby’, but usually of the baby snuffling along the father’s chest, finding the nipple and sucking. The men are usually very surprised, but the babies seem content.”

Sebastian Kraemer, a child psychiatrist at the Whittington Hospital in London, said: “It is possible that in prehistoric societies this was a normal way of fathering.” He said that it would be wrong to assume from the past 10,000 years of history that our prevailing model of mother-based childcare was the right one.

Of 156 cultures studied for the report, only 20 per cent were found to promote men’s close relationships with infants, with only 5 per cent doing the same for a father’s involvement with young children.

The report estimates that fathers worldwide contribute between a quarter and a third as much time as women to childcare, but it notes that active fathering is on the increase. In Britain the amount of time that fathers spend with their children has risen by eight times in the past 30 years.

Michael Lamb, professor of psychology at Cambridge University and a world expert on fatherhood, said: “Internationally, over the past 20 years, we have seen fathers who live with their children spending more time with them and doing more diverse activities, not just in Britain but in every known society.”

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