For example even puppies will understand to crawl over and latch to mother, primates come out clinging to mother, horses and goats can walk, yet babies have to be taken care of for so long and are helpless!
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Babies are able to swim from birth, check it out on YouTube. We aren’t the most advanced but we aren’t entirely useless as babies
One is actually the cause of the other.
We’ve evolved to be smarter because the smarter Apes were better able to survive.
But one of the big trade offs for that is that we have such large heads even as babies that we have to be born effectively pre-mature compared to other animals to get through the birth canal.
So having helpless babies is a side effect of being so smart, but being smart is what helps us raise helpless babies.
It’s more of a reverse effect. Because humans are so smart and utilize shelter so well, humans didn’t need to evolve to be better survivors at the baby stage. Additionally, because our brains are so big, babies have trouble with mobility compared to other mammals. It was a trade off based on efficiency for our lifestyle
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Because we are so intelligent and have generally zero problems from predators when we are born and haven’t for thousands of years, we didn’t evolve in a way that would keep us alive from birth or that makes us grow exceptionally fast. There’s a few other animals that have quite long maturing periods as well but ours is unusually long because of our species mixed with how damn well we survive. If it were a problem we wouldn’t be the most heavily populated thing on this planet
Humans are so big brained that we decided our children should be born premature.
Joke phrasing, serious answer. Humans are born early so that their heads can develop to a size that would be dangerous for a human to give birth to.
Essentially the helplessness of our infants is an evolved tradeoff between brain size and maternal hip size/birth canal size.
Most mammal infants gestate until they’re somewhat self-sufficient – foals and calves are born and can stand immediately and know instinctively to go to the mammary teats for sustenance. Developmentally speaking if a human child were to gestate long enough that it could do something comparable, mothers would be carrying babies for 2-3 years (think like elephants – they carry their young for almost two years). While most 3 yr old toddlers are quite thin, their _heads_ are disproportionately massive – cause human brains are disproportionately massive compared to our bodies. If our children gestated till 3 yrs old mothers would have to pass these massive craniums, and that would require very wide hips (not to mention lots of ripping and tearing most likely)
So instead we’ve evolved to push out our babies when the infant craniums are juuuust small enough to squeak through mom’s birth canal. even then, there’s lots of cranial squishing (baby skulls are really soft). The downside to having disproportionately big brains is that we have to birth our kids completely useless and not ready for the world.
Because human development all about learning, we have to figure out how things work. We’re not in the same situation where we’ll die if we can’t run at top speed as soon as we’re born, we aren’t expected to be able to be self reliant as toddlers either. So it benefits us most to take to time to learn things.
If humans were born as fully developed as other animals, the human head would be too big to fit through the birth canal of the mother. So humans are born really underdeveloped compared to other mammals. So for humans to be born with a more complete form, either we would need a smaller brain, or female hips would need to be much much wider.
The smaller brain route is what other apes stuck with.
It’s exactly BECAUSE we’re so smart that we’re so helpless as babies. If our brains developed as much before we were born as other mammals do then mothers surviving childbirth wouldn’t be a thing do to how big babies heads would be. In order for our mothers to survive giving birth most of our brain development has to occur after we’re born. That’s as opposed to most mammals whose brains are mostly developed before they’re born.
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