Tag: Infants
Sumatran orangutans start crafting their engineering skills as infants
At six months old, human infants are still working on sitting up by themselves. But baby orangutans at that age are already developing their engineering skills.
Orangutans build complex sleeping platforms as high as 20 meters in the tree canopy — the equivalent of four stories above the ground — every single evening. The nests are intricate and can include woven elements, pillows, blankets, padding and roofs to protect from rain.
But nest building isn’t instinctive to orangutans — it
Milk Is an Evolutionary Marvel
If an alien life form landed on Earth tomorrow and called up some of the planet’s foremost experts on lactation, it would have a heck of time figuring out what, exactly, humans and other mammals are feeding their kids.
The trouble is, no one can really describe what milk is—least of all the people who think most often about it. They can describe, mostly, who makes it: mammals (though arguably also some other animals that feed their young secretions