I begin this post with some quotes from Meredith F. Small’s book “Our Babies, Ourselves – How biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent”
“…about 98 percent of our genetic material is identical to that of chimpanzees. We are, in fact, more closely related to chimpanzees than chimpanzees are to gorillas. I state this fact to underscore a point: Human babies, and human adults for that matter, are animals. We are primates, a kind of mammal, and our babies are animal babies. Although humans like to think of themselves as unique, we share much of our physiology and behavior with others of our kind, with other primates. For example, the shape of our head follows a continuum with other primates that shows a reduced snout and an enlarged brain case with a full forehead and forward-facing eyes. Our teeth are primate teeth, rather than dog teeth or alligator teeth. Our eyes see the way monkeys’ eyes see, with color vision and good depth perception to facilitate swinging through the trees. And our flexible hands-the hands that can pick ripe fruit off a tree, type these words or tie a shoe, hold a flower or build a model plane-distinguish us, and all primates, from other mammals that have paws. Our whole upper skeleton reflects an even closer relationship to other primates, apes in particular. Using a human anatomy book, one can dissect a chimpanzee or a gorilla and find everything in the right place. We have the upper bodies of long-armed apes. The only difference, in a broad anatomical sense, is the fact that the human pelvis, legs, and feet have been adapted to upright walking. So much of our physiology is simply that of an upright-walking primate….”
“…I begin the tale of human infants at the beginning of our species and look at the human infant as an evolutionary organism that evolved over generations into its modern form. We are born naked, with only a fraction of our brain complete. We cannot stand up, defend ourselves, or find food. And we grow very slowly; the human infant is the most dependent infant on earth. Why is that?
For some reason, millions of years ago, our species evolved away from an ape-like ancestor and stood up. The anatomical change in the pelvic region necessary for bipedalism placed architectural constraints on the shape of the human pelvis. As brain size increased during our evolutionary history, the dictates of the bipedal pelvis required that human infants finish their neural growth outside the womb. Because human infants are so dependent, their parents must invest heavily in raising each infant; and they must form an intimate relationship with an infant who has few ways to communicate his or her needs. Nature has set up an entwined, symbiotic relationship between parents and offspring, and from this grows the infant-parent bond, a necessary feature of human biology and growth. Chapter One describes this evolutionary path of the human infant and explains the special characteristics of the youngest members of our species and their necessary relationship with adults….”
Many people do not like the idea that we have developed from something to become humans and many people don’t like or even understand how we developed from cave dwelling or grass huts to our current nuclear family which live in many roomed buildings aka houses.
Some of us also forget how short a time it was since ‘we’ were more primitive in our ways compared to how long ‘we’ have actually been human.
I started writing a post on “Who has time to parent today?” and then really began to think about this in more depth and begun to think about how humans have developed over time/history.
