To wonder how the human race has lasted so long?

[ProudBadMum]

When baby animals are born they are either left to survive alone or they are born and can pretty much walk and fed them self not long after.

Yet human babies need caring for pretty much all their life by their parents.

Currently feeding a 6 month old who won't sit still due to excitement of food so is kicking the spoon of orange mush everywhere and I'm thinking that if I was a giraffe I wouldn't have to do that.

I've seen kittens that can survive on their own longer than my daughter would

Animal babies sense danger and leave situations. Mine would stay put and chew her toes while a predator creeped up. Probably smile at the predator before her face got eaten.

She doesn't even expect the 'plop' at the end of the barbershop song that I've sang to her from birth.

How did cave parents fight off beasts while stopping their babies eating stones? Surely we shouldn't have lasted this long

My 7 year old wouldn't wake if a tribe ransacked the house never mind if we lived in a cave and a dinosaur ate his family. Her sleep through getting eaten.

Why are we at the top of the food chain when we are pretty much useless for a good few year?!

I know this is a lighthearted thread! But the uselessness of babies, their dependence, the pain and danger of childbirth, the cost to mother of being pregnant, breast-feeding and carrying for so long is all worth it because of our big, crenelated brains. Because we can use fire, weapons and planning.

And predators aren't evolved to attack a spiky, hot animal that knows their routes. People forget that prey is one meal to a predator; it's not worth it to be killed while hunting for them. So being intelligent was really successful. And social. That was important too.

I have often wondered this while listening to a small baby well into its second hour of screaming and wailing with no way to comfort or quiet it. Every predator for miles around must have known where those caves were!

And human babies are 'naturally' hesitant of dangers that would have been an issue. Wonder why your toddler is fussy about food? That because of poisonous food. Don't eat something unless you've seen people around you eat it a few times. Crawling babies won't crawl off a drop off. And you can hang a newborn off a washing line if you're a weirdo because they can cling on.

And those crying humans would have had fires, spears and guards around them. Also, we domesticated dogs very early on; that puts predators off a lot.

Does the washing line thing work with older children MrsTP?

You could try it don't sue me.

Shall try the washing line thing with the kids tomorrow.

It isn't like they get better when they get older. I was telling mine that she probably shouldn't do cartwheels near the top of the stairs.

'oh its fine, mum....last time I feel all the way down the stairs it didn't even hurt that much'

She's right too goddamn her. full 12 step tumble with added somersault, landed on the wooden floor at the bottom perfectly on her face. Not a scratch on her.

I can confirm that a crawling baby will fall off a drop off .

I was 'watching' a baby (for about 5 seconds!) when i was about 8. It was crawling on the bed - i just thought it would stop at the edge... It didn't

I've wondered this and I'm guessing it's because it was a given that some of your babies would die. Most girls probably started having babies around 13 and then had them back to back until they died in their 40s.
We're programmed to hate the sound of babies crying so automatically pick up and feed our babies (or someone else's babies) and probably did everything with them tied to us.

Loving this thread. Have a clingy three year old on my lap and an 11 month old baby busy climbing the sofa. Sod survival skills; I will accept offspring that don't actively try to kill themselves. I may try the washing line trick later...

But ds2 ate his own poo when he was a baby, not so fussy about food after all.

Nariokotome Boy was pubescent at the age of eight though so historically kids were more advanced. We are going backwards I guess.

we are defo going backwards i would say.

I think it's that we evolved in a safe environment where there were fewer predators. The Savannah theory has largely been discredited now so the conditions for our evolution were perhaps not as dangerous as we previously thought.

Also humans are very social creatures. Living in tight knit communities, sharing resources and protection kept the "nasty" things out.

Pair-bonding for men and menopause for elder women, combined with communal child rearing provided the mother and child with the support they needed.

DD would survive fine. At 6 she's a perfect Viking. A bloody awful grade 1 student!

Humans also have reciprocal altruism which really helps. We're not on our own, IYSWIM.

The 12 year old having terrible risk assessment? Well someone has to fight the wolves, go hunting, find new sources of food or water. You have to kind of an idiot to want to! That's what teenagers are for.

The drop off experiment was a glass floor and a 'hard' drop off. It's possible a baby wouldn't see the fluffy edge of a bed as a drop off!

Don't try the experiments at home, people!

So I shouldn't leave the baby on the coffee table and see what happens? I have a balcony?

She's just roll off.

She'd*

We're not sure yet how humans perceive edges, so the edge of a bed onto carpet may not have been perceived as an actual edge so the affordance might have been a bit skew whiff.

We survived mostly because we're a pain in the ass to kill and not really worth the effort it takes to kill us. Animals won't continue a hunt after it's apparent that the energy to be gained by eating the prey is less than the energy that would be expended by continuing to chase it. Humans are the fastest things on earth over about 26 miles, so we weren't worth the effort, however, that did make us formidable hunters.

DD2 has just written a uni report on that study on babies and crawling over edges . One of her conclusions (that didn't make it into the report thankfully) was that it's too hard these days to set up "proper" experiments . Perhaps some MNetters can volunteer their DC to her she's the most likely of my DDs to return them in one piece?

I think we are designed to live in groups so there's always a dozen or so eyes on the kiddies and everyone gets a break to pick some berries and slice a bit of woolly rhinoceros off the stash and chill out. I think this isolated lifestyle is against the design and nature of humans.

I think this isolated lifestyle is against the design and nature of humans.

Amen to that!

All the putting everything in your mouth except for food given to you by your primary care giver has confused me many a time.

We survived because of maternal/paternal love for our DCs.

I've often thought, on hearing about awful things happening to young people, that if someone did something terrible to injure or cause long term damage to my DC I could happily chop the offender up with a carving knife.
So we will protect our DCs to the last - thus preserving the human race.

The reasons why humans survived is complex. It's a multitude of reasons. We are intelligent, social, extremely adaptable, dexterous and so on. You can list any animal species here, we always have an edge over them. We are always several steps ahead. We have no more enemies, no other species that would mean a significant threat. Maybe bacteria and viruses.

We survived because of maternal/paternal love for our DCs.

This is a very valid point. There are quite a few theories regarding why human offspring are born with very underdeveloped brains, thus making them so dependant on their parents. I honestly think it's a deliberate design as this utter dependancy causes a very deep bond and has forged close family relations for generation after generation. Humans need other humans to survive.