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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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.
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