Infant Behavior as a Key to Human Behavior
Staring at that skull, I was struck by the fact that this ancient child was somebody's baby long ago. Perhaps she was sick, or maybe he e was accident-prone, or perhaps this baby was some predator's dinner. Standing there, I could picture him or her long ago, I, smiling, laughing, and reaching out to grab a mother's breast. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
From a biological point of view, the Taung child represents a specific stage of development for Australopithecines, our ancestors that lived from four to two million years ago. Paleontologists tend to concentrate on adults of any species because adulthood is the mature end product; but fossilized babies and children also give clues to anatomy and physiology, to rates of development and growth. Children are not just miniature versions of adults. There are sound evolutionary reasons why infants and children look and behave the way they do—childhood is a specifically evolved stage in the life course. The Taung child emphasizes the fact that we are not born as adults but go through a lengthy period of growth and change. In this child, and all children, are some of the most important secrets of our anatomy and behavior. There are reasons why mice are born blind and human babies cannot hold their heads up. Natural selection has opted for fawns to stand on their own soon after birth, for human infants to smile automatically, and for baby chimpanzees to cling to their mothers' fur. And all of this makes some sort of natural biological sense. The pattern of birth, infancy, and childhood in any species follows a particular course that eventually outlines adult biology and behavior.
Notes:
There are secrets to why humans are the way they are in how our children behave.
Folksonomies: evolution infancy instinct
Taxonomies:
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Biology (0.967156): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Evolution (0.833660): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Infant (0.772202): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Natural selection (0.597876): dbpedia | freebase
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Human anatomy (0.502992): dbpedia | freebase
Charles Darwin (0.488773): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago
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