Note that humans are helpless for an incredibly long period of time (compare with horses, who can run almost as soon as they hit the ground). It looks like natu

Note that humans are helpless for an incredibly long period of time (compare with horses, who can run almost as soon as they hit the ground). It looks like nature has offloaded a lot of the normal work from the child to the parents, in the case of humans; we're very much an evolutionary oddity in this regard. Interesting factoid from the fascinating Legal Systems Very Different From Ours: the Kaale (a Gypsy tribe in Finland) don't recognise the parent-child relationship at all, because reproduction is ritually unclean; the facts of reproduction cannot be admitted. Instead, a mother leaves the tribe to bear her baby, and returns with it, whereupon the baby becomes the entire kin-group's responsibility. Sounds to me like a good way to let parents have some sleep, by batching up the group's children!