My little daughter Elizabeth is 14 months and starting to walk. She is still wobbly on her feet and every now and then goes plonk on her backside. Fortunately, since her backside is only about a foot from the ground she doesn't sustain any injury and is soon up again. This leads me to wonder: do babies have short legs to make it less traumatic to learn to walk? If they had longer legs or were heavier, would nature have provided them with some kind of reinforcement to their posteriors? Is all this a lucky coincidence or has it in fact effected the shapes of babies and the age at which they start trying to walk? If there was no good compromise between leg length/weight/pain would we still be on all fours?
Teething is painful and nature says 'deal with it'. How painful could learning to walk have been?
Peter's Moblog
