Over the past month, I’ve watched my 1-year-old nephew, Lachlan, learn to walk. It’s become part of my daily routine to wake up to Whatsapp videos with the latest progress.
I love seeing how my sister’s cheers give him confidence to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Seeing him change from ‘New Born’ to ‘First stepper’ got me thinking about how different we are to other animals. The young horse is walking within minutes, and the baby spider monkey is strong enough to cling to its mother as she swings through the trees just a few weeks after birth.
The scientific explanation for this difference is us humans are born with immature brains. The pelvic canal is too narrow for a mature brain to get through, so we’re born pre-maturely compared to other primates, and need a lot of care in our early years until our brains develop sufficiently to control physical movement.
Yuval Noah Harari in his book, Sapiens, describes our underdeveloped birth as the reason we can be educated and socialised to a far greater extent than any other animal. We can learn, change, improve, and become. Whereas animals born with mature brains have largely fixed traits and habits.
I’ve enjoyed thinking about this concept over the past couple years, but it was put into perspective with the small, bold steps of my little Lachlan.