What this slowing down of development means in practical terms is that human infants are almost completely helpless when they are born and for a considerable time afterwards. It is almost as if they experience another year of gestation outside the womb, while rapid growth of the brain takes place.Given the extreme dependency of our offspring, which extends out to 12 or more years of life, the human strategy for successful reproduction necessarily involves having relatively few offspring and devoting enormous amounts of energy to raising each of them. The long intimate relationship of mother and child is probably the central feature of our lives; it forms the basis of much of our later social life. Humans are normally capable of bonding deeply with others and of establishing life-long relationships of many kinds. This capacity seems related to our long period of juvenile dependency.
Looking at the relationship from the parent side, individual humans and human groups have to be able to provide an unprecedented amount of care and attention to their offspring for the species or cultural group to survive. It is interesting to note in this regard that all human societies recognize complex kinship relationships and practice some form of marriage. These may, at bottom, be practical ways of organizing support for the care of children.
An unusual physical characteristic of human females may play a role in this complex set of adaptations: in humans, estrus or the brief fertile period in the female's cyle, is "disguised." Neither the woman nor her mate is aware of the event. In many mammals, such as chimps, mating behavior is strictly controlled genetically by the hormones released by the female during her fertile period. When a female chimp is in estrus, she mates with the males in the vicinity. The concept of "choice" in these matters cannot be applied to either male or female, who simply respond to hormonal stimuli. No bonding of chimp males and females occurs in these matings, and no supportive family unit is formed to care for the offspring. In humans, the time that the female is fertile is not perceivable and does not seem to affect sexual behavior. Sexual behavior can occur at any time of the cycle. Human beings are thus in a sense freed from the estrus cycle, and they can choose when or whether to mate. Frequently, life-long bonds develop between human males and females, although human mating behavior can also be as casual as that of chimps.
It is therefore interesting to speculate how much the development of culture was driven by the need to cooperate to provide care for slow-developing human infants--and how much the long and intense relationship between child and parents influenced the development of language and other aspects of our social behavior.
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