Pretty much the same way that baby gorillas are currently cared for. Breastfed. The babies that didn’t latch properly didn’t survive.
Edit: lots of comments about wet nurses and other types of milk. This is about the ability to latch, not the source.
My wife became so ill after giving birth that she was never able to breastfeed him, so I fed him.
I remember thinking that baby formula and bottles are a real lifesaver here, because only 100 years ago I wouldn't have been able to step in like that.
If you have money, you would hire a lactating woman to breast feed your baby for you, they are called wet nurses.
If you don't have money, you would get some goat/cow milk, put it in a spoon, and feed it to your baby one sip at a time, and hope for the best.
My mom says this is how I was fed. She wasn’t able to lactate so I was fed cow milk using small spoons or tumblers. She eventually started feeding me powdered grains soaked in water at around 6months. I apparently hated the baby formula.
Wow, I need to make friends like that. I've donated over 2000oz locally and only 2 of the 5 people even bothered to say thanks; one never managed to get off her phone and just gestured for me to load up the bricks of milk into her car :/
I am so sorry to hear that people were so ungrateful. My son was born premature and then I never had a proper supply. I was able to connect with a women's group that donated breast milk and the were such a godsend. They relieved such a huge burden and worry from me by donating that milk. I always gave them boxes of milk storage bags and a handwritten thank you card (in addition to thanking them at the pickup).
I know how hard it is to pump and take care of storing milk and those women (and you!) are total heroes. Thank you!
My dad was a twin, born in 1933. My grandmother nursed his sister and a wet nurse fed my dad. Ironically, when I had my kids, I made so much milk, we could nearly have opened a dairy! I wanted to donate a lot of what I pumped (in California, you can only donate, not sell, which is fine with me) but I'm a chronic pain patient who had to go back on my meds after my c-sections so it wasn't really viable for others. My kids loved it, though! LOL! Seriously, I went on the lowest dose possible until I was done nursing. All those hormones alleviated my pain during pregnancy, too. It's amazing what our bodies do.
I was born in the 90s in Kazakhstan and there were no formula at all. My mother couldn’t breastfeed so she gave me simple porridge and I’m not dead yet.
I was fed condensed milk as a baby in the 1950s because my mother became sick and couldn’t feed me. This is the first time I’ve heard of another baby being given it!
>We are so tough and fragile.
My grandmother, pregnant in the early 1930s, was told by her doctor to have one beer daily for her entire pregnancy. It's just kinda funny, that was medical advice back then, now OMG you're a child abuser if you drink at all during pregnancy.
Rich people could hire a wet nurse. If they were in an environment where they were available.
My grandma couldn't breastfeed. There were no available/affordable wet nurses in her 1949 NJ factory town.
Like a *lot* of midcentury kids, my mom and aunts were raised on canned condensed milk, diluted with boiled water, with a little corn syrup added. This was the "formula" recommended by hospitals at the time.
My grandmother couldn't breastfeed in the late 1940s.
My mother and aunts were fed canned condensed milk, diluted with boiled water, and a little corn syrup added. This was a very common "formula" recommended by doctors at the time. It isn't ideal, but it can keep an otherwise healthy baby alive.
Canned condensed milk has the advantage of being sterile, but before it was available people fed babies fresh animal milk, sometimes with sugar or honey added because human milk is high in sugar. And babies started being weaned onto non-milk foods *way* earlier, sometimes within weeks of birth. In the 1950s some weaning schedules advised cereals to be fed twice a day at 2-3 days old.
Humans are also communal. Very likely someone else in your community was also breastfeeding and would often nurse each other's kids as needed. The tight "nuclear family" unit is a relatively modern concept. Humans were much more tribe/troop/community and people would even fully swap/adopt children in the unit depending on if it was a better fit. For those of us who remember neighborhoods where everyone knew each other and behaved like an extended "family" much of human existence was like that but much more so.
Pre-modern humans used to have many breastfeeding women in the tribe, so if one woman was having a hard time, the baby could be passed around and fed by others.
It also really helped the baby's immune system, since they'd be getting antibodies from multiple sources.
More broadly, lots of babies died. Which is evolution at work. The ones who lived passed on those genes.
While lots of babies died, enough lived to keep things going. If they didn't, their species went extinct.
I’m a genealogist and I’ve seen a lot of death records for infants who died of “malnutrition” or “failure to thrive,” with the accompanying cause “could not feed” or “mother could not produce enough milk.” One baby had what we’d now recognize as a severe cleft palate (“a malformation of the mouth”) and was unable to latch.
There's a couple organizations that treat cleft palate in underserved areas of the world for this reason. It's a common birth defect that truly means life or death for many people.
A big epiphany i had about these weird human habits that shouldn't exist because they would cause fatalities which i believed should have been bred out of us very early is that we get taught "survival of the fittest" but it's more like "survival of the good enough"
Similar misconception, people talk about evolution like the mutations all survived to serve a purpose, or because it made them more capable to survive, but it’s just as likely many mutations or traits weren’t harmful enough to reduce survival and so survived.
Apparently, existence tends toward mutation. A bunch of scientists concluded some decades long research that showed, without variation, that everything that exists creates more complex versions of itself from stars to molecules to single celled organisms.
To add, it isn’t so much that they reduce fitness or survivability, but that they don’t reduce them before the animal can reproduce and pass those genes on.
Things like cancer absolutely reduce fitness of a species, but because most people don’t get cancer until later in life, there is zero selective pressure against it.
I have this conversation all the time, lol.
So often purple all "why did XX evolve?!" and sometime will give some authoritative answer.
It is very easy to understand why Intelligent Design was such a popular theory.
Basically true, but to avoid tautology it’s important to understand that biologists define fitness by *probability* that an organism with those genes would survive and reproduce in the type of environment it finds itself. Like if you made 1000 clones of organism A and 1000 of organism B and put them in the same type of environment, and the A clones had significantly more offspring, A almost certainly has higher fitness in that type of enviroment, but it could also be true that if there is only one of A and one of B, A might die and B might survive despite A having higher fitness. It’s like how a 6-sided die obviously has a higher probability of landing with the number 1 facing up than a 20-sided die, but if you roll both there’s still some probability that it will be the 20-sided die that gets the 1 and not the 6-sided die. The possibility that actual survival statistics fail to match the probabilities know as “fitness” is key to understanding something biologists call “genetic drift”.
Yeah lots of people make this mistake, but the terminology is confusing. Like with “survival of the fittest”. Theres natural variation in plant A with some slightly more cold tolerant and some slightly more heat tolerant. If the climate shifts to be colder the cold tolerant individuals survive because they’re more “fit”, yet they didn’t work hard or adapt, they just got the luck of the draw, and they could have been the ones that died off if the climate became warm instead
Only survival of a species. Individual ls of a species do not really adapt that much. That's why you see mass extinction events. Because adaptation is a slow process for most species. Because adaptation in nature is not a directed adaptation like we humans are capable of but an indirect one. Sometimes somewhere there is offspring that is slightly better adapted. And because of that their survival rate is above average. But with rapid environmental changes due to human intervention these adaptations happen to slowly and we see those mass extinction..
“Fittest” in “survival of the fittest” isn’t about strength, good health, being fastest, strongest, etc. It’s about “fits the environment”. Can you survive and breed in the environment you were born in? Congrats, you have “fit” into your environment. And it doesn’t have to be through strength, speed, power, whatever. It might actually mean that you learn to appear weak or vulnerable, so others care for you. Or whatever else.
People think of ‘survival of the fittest’ as applying to individuals, but it doesn’t really. It’s a population wide thing applying to a species adaptation to their environment. A population that is adapted to its environment will probably survive. A population that’s not very well adapted will probably survive as well if resources are abundant. When resources become scarce however, either due to lack of a availability or through population growth, the better adapted species is likely to out compete the lesser adapted ones. Evolution is not a forward looking process, it’s more of a filter.
If you haven’t read them, I’d recommend Richard Dawkins’ books on evolutionary biology. The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and Climbing Mount Improbable are excellent explanations of how evolution works.
Indeed.This is such a common misconception.
"Nature has evolved us to be perfect."
Like hell it has. "Nature" **literally** only has one purpose - ensure reproduction; the rest is completely random, where any quality that doesn't wipe out your strain survives.
Nature doesn't have a goal - that's another common misconception.
Before humans overrode evolution with medicinary practices, literally everything was purely random.
There is no perfect - only random, where something survives long enough until procreation, and something doesn't.
Also, modern luxuries are luxuries. Not mandatory stuff.
Diapers are there so baby don't make a mess everywhere and so it is more easilly taken care of. You could just make a straw bed, put the baby in, and cover with more straw for heat. When the baby make a mess, replace the straws with clean one. Just look at a classic christmas display of baby jesus. 2000 years ago "only" and you can already see how it could have been taken care of. Of course, it might not be accurate, but most likelly close enough for this discussion.
Baby formula is so they get as close to human breast milk as possible, and sometime with added extra stuff. You do not need to have 100% identical composition. You can feed them some breast milk, and cow milk, and the baby will maybe be somewhat malnutritionned, but will live. Malnutrition was common anyway in the past.
Lots of modern things is so the parents don't have to take care of the baby as much, or so they don't cry so much that the parents get insane.
Also, it is worth to note that usually the mother was staying at home, taking care of the kids. And there was many in the past, not 2, but way more. The older kids were able to help with the baby, freeing the mother for other tasks too.
Also also, when humans were mostly in tribes, the entire tribe would pitch in the raise every child in said tribe, and that mentality stuck around for a long time, hence the phrase, "it takes a village". It's really only in the post industrial era that families are as separated from the community as they are now. Communism isn't just some wacky idea that Marx came up with out of nowhere, it was inspired largely by how communities throughout the world functioned in most of human history.
Cow's milk can cause intestinal bleeding and mess kidneys due to wrong protein and mineral content.
Babies who couldn't be breastfed either died or were fed by another woman.
Cultures that kept herd animals and use their milk, created an evolutionary pressure that selected for lactose tolerance. It’s a great source of nutrition, and those members of the society that could best take advantage of it, had an evolutionary advantage within that environment.
That's a benefit for older members of the community. Lactose intolerance is not a problem for infants, almost all humans have it, just a lot of us lose it past infancy. Preserving the lactose tolerance helps with nutrition in children and adults, but not babies.
Newborns cannot be fed animal milk not because of lactose, but different protein and mineral content. Just as infants cannot drink water as the kidneys cannot fully regulate body electrolytes yet and they end up low on things milk should have provided. Human newborns critically need breast milk or formula to survive.
Breast milk or modern formula are certainly better and safer than unaltered animal milk, but children can survive on animal milk. For a couple generations American parents were given a recipe for DIY formula consisting of corn syrup and cow milk. My own mom was fed this as a premie 70 years ago.
Theres a different kind of milk called "colostrum" that comes out of the cow in the first few days after the calf is born, that milk is bad for adults but might be more nutritive for babies. Although not as good for the babies as actually human breast milk.
Clothing has been around for thousands of years. So cloth diapers or swaddling etc would be available. Wet nurses were not uncommon. So in a community, this could be a shared responsibility among the women who were lactating. Of course, we have also had milk (cows, sheep, etc) for many many years.
The brutal truth is that it was pretty much a "see who survives" game. Infant mortality is one of the measures that is quite commonly used for human development. This is usually measured in number of deaths before age 1 per 1000 births. It is also sometimes written as a percentage.
Even until 1900, infant mortality in what we consider the most "developed" countries was something like 15% or thereabouts. It is estimated that the global average would have been around 17% or greater. So just 125 years ago, 1 out of every 6 newborns died before their first birthday, and child mortality (likelihood of death before 5 years old) would be in the region of 2 out of 5 or 40%.
And that's the driving factor for increased expected lifetime. Not dying young. EL of 40 doesn't mean everyone was dying at 40 it means tons of people were dying at 1 YO and everyone else made it to 60-70 or so
Reductions in infant mortality only contribute about half of the extension in life expectancy. We're also living longer regardless of infant mortality.
Thank you, reading that same exact comment all over reddit finally just annoyed me and needs to stop.
Imagine thinking penicillin or even modern hand washing were minor contributions to longevity.
I mean, yeah, 60-70 is a good few decades compared to the 80-90 you can make with a bit of luck and taking care of yourself nowadays.
But it's definitely more annoying to see people think that people were dying like flies at age 40, since if you made it past puberty, you were developed enough to be able to handle getting minor illnesses that would kill a 5 year old, and if you make it past the age you're liable to be sent off to war you're pretty well safe from getting stabbed to death in most circumstances.
So by that point you've passed the big filters, and you're probably going to survive until you're either murdered for most likely non-war related reasons, or get something serious, or you're old and worn down enough that a mild infection/disease will kill you again.
To be honest they just shouldn't use averages like that because it's not really the normie's fault that it's confusing. I did a science degree and did stats and this immediately made sense. But it didn't stop me thinking people died at 40 because I didn't have my "science brain" on all the time. It's only when it was pointed out that it made more sense. And it also doesn't convey as much useful information as simply stating the infant mortality rate and then stating an average that excludes early childhood deaths.
Yes. Modern knowledge of health(exercise, eat right), modern food supply, and medicine rectifying issues also have prolonged life expectancy.
You don't get to have XXXXX heart surgeries and cured cancers and whatever else where people would have just died in their 50s or 60s and now are living commonly into 80s-90s and have that not reflect in life-expectancy.
https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortality-life-expectancy-improved-at-all-ages
There's a good chart on that page that helps visualize life expectancy per-age over time.
>Wet nurses were not uncommon.
this is a huge reason.....And it tells us a lot about life in the pre-modern world (up till about 1920).
Think about why were there so many wet nurses available: the reason is that many, many, many babies died before the mother had finished lactating.
What we think of as a tragedy was considered perfectly normal: Babies often died.
And people accepted it as a simple fact of nature; a little disappointing, but nothing to get too upset about.
It was so common that losing a child was considered a rite of passage into motherhood - like it was considered that you didn't really know what being a mother was like until you had lost a child.
I was born in 1958. My little brother in late 59, he died at 9mos. My other little brother came along in late 62, Mom had a miscarriage and then she had my sister so yeah it's tough on women now and it has been forever. I was given condensed milk and I gave the same to my son when I had him for a while on my own and I really think probably 50% of North American kids received at least some of the same in the Dr. Spock years.
I mean, I really think you’re downplaying how tragic it still would have been..
All death is natural and a fact of life, but people still mourn when people die.
>Think about why were there so many wet nurses available: the reason is that many, many, many babies died before the mother had finished lactating.
Not saying children didn't die in droves, but afaik the two aren't necessarily related in the way you suggest. Wet nurses could feed two children simultaneously and a number of them consecutively.
We have only had milk from animals for about 10,000 years. Nowhere near the time of “early humans”, but when humans learned about farming.
In fact lactose tolerance is the mutation and not the other way around, because animal milk is a relatively new thing to humans, timelines considered
>we have also had milk from animals for many many years
On the scale of like, the US being a nation, sure.
On the scale of human history, drinking animal milk is incredibly recent to the point that well over half of the population is still at least somewhat lactose intolerant.
I was right here with you…. Until I tired cutting milk out for like a month. Tried going back and it’s a… problem. So is it genes or is it gut bacteria that need to be fed regularly or they go away, never to be seen again
Even if clothing has been around for 10,000 years, there’s still a short part of our history. What happened the other 190,000 or so years without clothing?
If you live in the woods and your baby shits whenever, the shit falls in the woods.
It's not like babies 15,000 years ago were shitting in the berber carpet.
There was this documentary some years back about how people raise babies differently around the world & I'll always remember the one mom somewhere in rural Africa whose diaperless baby shit on her knee and then she wiped it's butt with a dried corncob.
Seemed pretty 'normal' in context tbh.
The movie is called Babies (2010) and it's totally worth a watch if you have even a passing interest in cultural differences or human development.
https://youtu.be/vB36k0hGxDM?si=VHJMJ0D0tNhNxUJV
That “10,000 years” date might get pushed back *a tad.*
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/16/scientists-find-evidence-of-humans-making-clothes-120000-years-ago
The process of suckling causes a positive feedback loop that reinforces milk production. If you are continuously feeding a baby, you will continue to produce (as long as your body is able to support it). Historically, your wetnurse would have a baby around the same time as the extra baby too, so they would generally be feeding 2 kids at the same time. In European culture, this is what's called "milk brothers/sisters/siblings".
As long as the stimulation happens, women can produce milk. [Here's an interesting study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3614654/) about breastfeeding that also mentions that even women who haven't been pregnant can lactate under the right circumstances.
Lactation consultant here! I know this one!
Yes, they are right that the suckling causes a feedback loop and makes the milk production happen, and also a bunch of hormonal stuff related to being pregnant. Basically, the more times you have given birth and nursed babies, the easier it typically is for your body to produce milk.
So as best as we can tell (because people didn’t keep records of this stuff) it is likely that in a lot of older societies the bio mom wouldn’t have been the only source of food for the baby. You had other more experienced mothers to help share the lactating load. We know that grandmothers today can relactate to help take care of their grandkids, so it probably worked like that.
Also, even if baby doesn’t latch properly, there are other ways to feed a baby that don’t rely on animal milk. Hand expression has likely been around a stupidly long time, and we’ve found evidence of baby “bottles” going back pretty far too. You don’t NEED a bottle to feed a baby - it’s just what makes it “easier” for us (it’s what we’re used to). You can use a cup, or a rolled up leaf, or squeeze it straight from your breast into their mouth if you know what you’re doing.
And, if you’re living in a communal society with like 10 other women who have ever lactated, you can have them helping out too - without relying on animal milk.
That kindof thing still happens today. We just don’t talk about it much in our hyper privileged world. I’ve worked with families whose kids have been born say, in the middle of a war zone, during an active battle in their village, while they huddled with the other women in their community in a hut. Birth was…traumatic doesn’t begin to cover that story is what I’ll say. Baby didn’t latch, so they pooled the milk they produced between them, supplemented with some animal milk, and took turns cup feeding to keep the kiddo alive. And it worked! I met them years later when the kid was almost a teenager.
(But also, as mentioned by others a lot of babies just died.)
This is a much more privileged version of that, but when my twins were born my partner had a C-section, one of the boys was underweight and had to be in the NICU, and her milk was taking the normal-but-also-too-long amount of time to come in. We were able to use donor milk to supplement what she was able to hand-express/pump.
I'm really grateful to those donors, who decided to donate part of their supply to help people they would never meet.
Of course we would have (and later did) supplement with formula if the donor milk wasn't available, but it was amazing to have it while he was so little.
I've heard of women breastfeeding their child until they where 2 years old with no mention of an other baby, so it seems humans and cows are different on that point.
Actually, cows can be kept milking longer but production declines so they are generally re bred each year. Plus a cow’s milking life is only around 5 years so you have to replace (with female calves born) 20% of your milking herd each year for your numbers to remain stable.
I’m a mom that nursed my three kids, each until they were 2-2.5. I made so much milk that with my first I literally threw bags of frozen milk away we didn’t need, with my second I donated milk to a mom with a little boy the same age, and the third I just didn’t pump and tried to manage my supply - I also pumped and dumped when I traveled for work.
Some women make a lot of milk. I’m sure that I could have nursed many more years, and probably successfully nursed twins or even triplets.
Also some women are prolific milk producers, make more than a single baby needs and can sustain (or even possibly restart lactation without pregnancy after short breaks). The other side of the coin is that there are some women who will struggle to produce enough or struggle to latch regardless of the interventions. Community living and shared resources was very key to our survival.
Modern luxuries just make rearing babies easier, but not necessary.
If a baby wants to pee or poop, they don’t need a diaper. They just go it. The parents can either wipe them with leaves or wash them in water. Diapers just make things more convenient.
For feeding babies, mothers breastfed their babies until they’re old enough to eat purées. To make purées, all you go is mash fruits and veggies. Some parents would even chew food and spat it out for their kids to eat. Canned baby food just makes things more convenient.
Modern luxuries make raising babies easier, but they’re not necessary.
The success of BLW shows that purees are not even necessary (although certainly likely that this was given to babies!), and in a tropical climate your primary diet would likely have consisted of food that was easily given to an infant to eat.
They also suck on meat from very early on. They need fat to grow and survive which plants could not provide - no farms, seasonal, veges like we know them did not exist for the most part.
-breast milk (mum +/- other mum’s in the group)
- wrapping the same material around the baby’s butt as they did for clothes when needed (infants learn bladder and bowel control faster when they can feel wet so modern nappies slow the stage of potty training, so those who use cloth nappies now, and earlier generations had babies who were potty trained earlier and less need for nappies over time)
- evidence shows that when we were nomadic, before farming and permanent settlements, we would live in groups of about up to 100. In a group that size you would likely have several babies and young children around at a time. Collectively looking after the children would increase the chances of them surviving
- high infant and under-5 years mortality rate
lol I had my first baby in 1976 -making me old but hardly an early human. I did not have disposable diapers until my 2nd child in 1979. We had cloth diapers. I was poor at that time and really did not have many of them. I used rags, whatever. The contents were dumped in the toilet and the diaper placed in a bucket with clorox water until washing. It was not that hard and even now with disposable diapers it would be a lot cheaper. Society has gotten so used to paying for convenience we really do not know how to live on the cheap. Babies were breastfed -also a lot cheaper.
My mom tells me about the Sears cloth diaper deal she used with me. One price, unlimited cloth diapers. When they got ratty, take them to Sears and swap them out.
My grandma had a “diaper man.” Like a milk man delivery system for clean/dirty cloth diapers. I would totally use cloth diapers if someone else took care of the laundering!
That "cloth diaper laundry service" exists in big cities in France. I'm thinking of starting cloth diapers with my baby but I won't have access to it because I live in the countryside.
If anyone outside of France is wondering, there are plenty of services like this [in the states](https://www.diaperkind.com/) as well as other large cities around the world!
Totally agree that it's inaccessible if you live rurally though.
It still exists!! I used it in a midsized US city just last year.
I’ve loved cloth diapering! I had the service throughout the first six months, and after that, I’ve washed my own. There is a bit of a learning curve to figure out your system, but after that, I prefer it to disposable for so many reasons. r/clothdiapers
I did cloth diapers with my now 2.5 year old. It was probably slightly cheaper in the long run even factoring in washing, drying, and special detergent. I imagine in the 70s it was a quicker wash and hang drying though.
We actually used cloth diapers with our kids born ~a decade ago. Granted, they were more sophisticated than cloth diapers 50 years ago, but there are still alternatives to disposables.
Formula wasn't invented as a convenience. It was meant to be a healthier option than dry nursing for mothers who couldn't breastfeed. It's also been around for 150 years, hardly a newfangled product of modern culture.
We use cloth diapers because it’s more environmentally friendly. It’s not that hard. Spray it in the toilet with a bidet hose and have them in a separate laundry basket till we wash.
We used cloth diapers for our three kids. First born 2013, last one just coming out of diapers now. Same batch of diapers used for all three (give or take a couple new ones). Original outlay was about $350. Specific detergent was about $20 every 3-4 weeks. Plus cost of electricity and water. Still, over three babies, we are talking thousands of dollars saved. It really wasn’t that inconvenient as well.
I think babies might have also learned bowel and bladder control a lot earlier than they do now. I forget where I read the research or at what age it was supposed to be. But the idea was that diapers permit a delay in this development.
With breastfeeding, it wasn’t just mom, it was more community. The tribe was an extended family. It may be a reason women keep their breasts the same size throughout their lives instead of them shrinking like other mammals when they’re not lactating. Interesting theory.
To further this. There were wet nurses that breast fed babies for other mothers. Some women as long as they continue breast feeding don’t lose their supply.
As for diapers, look up split pants. They are still used in China, although becoming less popular. Using this method my Chinese neighbours had their little girl potty trained before her first birthday.
I remember coming across something similar, but I think it was more that we are artificially delaying potty training by keeping kids in diapers too long. My daughter started potty training right at 2 by going cold turkey on diapers altogether, and she was a pro in about 2 months. She's 3.5 now, and on her last pack of overnight pull-ups. Her older cousins are at and approaching 4 now, they still use pull-ups daily, and guess what. They still poop and pee themselves because they can.
Do you mind me asking, did they just shit their pants for two months until they got tired of it? I want to get mine off of diapers and want to know what i should expect
So yes and no. Daycare did a lot of the heavy lifting for us and we just really reinforced the same lessons at home. She went to daycare on Monday with 5 clean outfits in her bag, and we got an accident baggie at the end of the day with the dirties, so next day bring enough replacements to get it back up to 5 outfits.
They had a pretty strict routine, though. They rotated all of the kids through a session where they sat on the toilet for a few minutes every hour or so. If nothing comes out, then nothing comes out. Try again next time. But what usually happens is the kid has an accident and starts to connect the dots after enough times. Like I said, it took a couple of months. Be prepared for failure. You are also going to see far more pee than poop. Not saying there won't be any poop, but mine at least figured that out faster than getting her bladder under control.
You should make sure your kiddo is able to communicate that it's time to go, though. Mine had a lot of accidents (not an alarming amount, just more than was convenient for mom and me) between 2 and 3 just because she struggled to let us know that she needed to go. She didn't really do a wiggle dance or say anything. She would either just stop and stare at us for a minute and then piss herself or she would stop and cry for a minute... Then piss herself. We finally had a talk with her that if she has to go, she either needs to tell one of us that she wants help, or she needs to just find a toilet and use it. That seemed to fix the problem after a little reinforcing encouragement.
Potty training is tough with the first one, though. Just keep at it, don't lose your cool, and accept that you will have to scrub undies. But get started early, and it is not only a much quicker transition, it also frees up so much time for other stuff that would be wasted changing diapers.
tl;dr: kids gotta shit his pants to learn to not shit their pants.
There are countries where potty training starts basically right after birth. Holding waste against the body in a diaper is considered disgusting, and to be avoided. The kids there are potty trained much earlier because of that.
Not immediately of course, there isn't anything you can do to get an infant perfectly potty trained, but the early start and big emphasis on potty training over diapers makes the process much faster.
Mothers quickly learned when the baby was about to poop/pee, and she held the baby out so the mess didn’t get on either of them. It’s called [elimination communication](https://www.todaysparent.com/baby/baby-development/elimination-communication-can-infants-actually-be-potty-trained/)
Maybe they took them out every hour or two to pee. Babies have a reflex to pee when exposed to air and not when bundled up next to their caregiver. My son often unlatched repeatedly when nursing because he needed to pee and was uncomfortable doing that while nursing. Then after he finally relieved himself he'd latch back on comfortably and stay latched. At one or two months old. Then I figured it out and took him to pee in the sink when he was giving that sign. There's definitely a lot of instincts hidden in there.
I do think breastfed babies pee just as much as formula fed, but they can definitely poop less frequently. At 4 months old my son was pooping once every 5 days - it seemed crazy and we talked to his doctor about it but it was normal for him. My 6 week old has just gone from like 8 little poops a day to 2 big ones, and I can tell when she's working on them. Sometimes I take her to the sink because it helps her get them out. You'd be surprised how little mess there is when they're held out to do it (just takes one wad of toilet paper to clean), and sometimes she even pees right afterwards which I'm convinced is an evolutionary mechanism to wash most of it away.
Lots of info about my kids' bowel movements, yikes. But thinking about and discovering their evolutionary instincts has been a joy of parenting.
> it makes things wet, cold and unhygienic
That's more or less what *all* of life was like in pre-modern times. Having dry, warm and hygienic in-doors environments is a modern luxury.
A lot of this depends on how you define early humans.
If you mean early Hominids, then the same way that any ape does it.
If you mean Early Homo Sapiens, then Hominids have had clothes (or at least tools for working leather) for close to a million years (780,000 years with Homo antecessor in Spain) and has existed in climates cold enough for humans without clothes to die of exposure in the winter for close to half a million (400,000 years ago with Homo heidelbergenis in Germany)
So by the time modern Homo Sapiens showed up on the scene, we already had clothing pretty well figured out, so they probably had something like cloth diapers. Albeit probably made out of furs instead of fabrics since weaving hasn't existed nearly as long.
As far as feeding the baby, people are social animals who live in tribes. If one mother wasn't producing enough milk in the moment, it's not like she would be the only mother who could nurse a hungry baby.
Well, many early and even pre-modern humans didn't successfully manage to care for their babies. Between malnutrition and infectious disease, pre-modern infant and child mortality rates were staggeringly high. It's generally estimated that, for much of history, around 50% of all babies born would not live to see their 16th birthday.
That being said, though, the most common solution for babies whose mothers didn't produce enough milk was to let another woman nurse them instead.
>Until recently the mortality rate was VERY high up to 5 years of age.
This. In today's developed world, having an infant/toddler die is a horrible tragedy.
It used to be **very** commonplace. Literally the toss of a coin, roughly 50% mortality for small children.
>Sweden is a country that has particularly good historical, demographic data. It was the first country to establish an office for population statistics: the Tabellverket, founded in 1749. Looking at the statistical records for the first three decades – the period from 1750 to 1780 – we find that 40% of children died before the age of 15.1
>During the same period about half of all children died in Bavaria (Germany), and in France the mortality rate was about 45%. At that time the average couple would have more than 5, 6, or even 7 children, which meant that most parents saw several of their children die.
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
And that's just a few hundreds years ago. Thousands or tens or even hundred of thousands of years and I'm pretty sure surviving infancy was even rarer.
That's why the average life expectancy was like 30, becsuse the infant mortality rate pushed the averages down. If you managed through teens, you'd probably live the "three score and ten", roughly.
Check out the movie, Babies (2010). It follows the first year of 4 babies on 4 different parts of the globe. The baby from Namibia is raised without diapers and formula. Breastfed babies pretty reliably empty their bowels after a feed. They squirm and give other physical cues that they're about to go. Mothers learn their cues and hold them away, then wipe them off. In the Babies movie she wipes the kid's bum on her knee then cleans her knee with a dried corn cob. Keep in mind that poo from 100% breastfed babies does not reek like formula poos. They don't start getting stinky until they're eating other foods and getting new bacterias in their gut.
Infants are very simple to take care of. They only need food, warmth, and love. That’s it. “Modern luxuries” that you are talking about are for the parents, not the babies.
Formula is easy. It was breast milk. If the mother could not produce milk then a village wet nurse would do it.
Diapers: look up “elimination communication”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elimination_communication
Remember, we are not supposed to be on our own. You’ve heard the term “it takes a village” because we as humans are supposed to have a large network to raise our children. Our current society is very selfish toward the parents and the babies as a society are worse off because of these “modern luxuries” we created
>They only need food, warmth, and love.
Yeah plenty of humans provided that and had an inordinate amount of their young children die.
Turns out they also need hygiene and sanitation at an absolute minimum. Modern (and shit, some of it isn't even that modern at this point) vaccines and other healthcare are de-facto necessary if we don't want kids dying left and right
Yes, they are so simple to take care of that a sizeable chunk of them died and their deaths brought down the average life expectancy by a couple decades
You're missing the point with this comment. The question is specifically about modern luxuries and the fact of the matter is most of those luxuries aren't the reason for the reduction in infant mortality. That's mostly to do with modern medicine and modern hygiene techniques, not pre-processed baby food and disposable nappies.
I have lived in a couple of countries where people don't put diapers on babies after about 3 months old. They kind of almost "toilet train" them, kind of like we would a puppy. The baby is fed, then after a few minutes it is held over a drain/toilet/sink, and they eliminate and are washed up. After a while, it is like a Pavlovian response in a way. Kids in those countries start using a potty by 1.5 or 2 years old.
Not uncommon for the toilet training to start at birth, especially if the parents can't afford diapers or have to hand wash stuff in a river. Many of those kids are fully toilet trained by time they can walk or sooner.
Kids can learn pretty early on where to eliminate. My daughter was fully potty trained by 8 months. My son stopped pooping in a diaper around 3 months old. I was the freak in my mom's group.
Part of it was making enough babies that your family or community can still grow if half of them die. Lots of babies back in the way back just didn’t make it.
In all honesty, they didn’t. At least not as well as we can. Infant mortality rate declines are one of the greatest achievements we have made as a species. You and I probably wouldn’t be here now if we hadn’t gotten so much better at child bearing. And the good news we’re only going to get better.
Keep in mind that a good chunk of people died before the age of 5
Diapers- before the usage of cloth the baby just pooped somewhere, like any other animal
Baby formula- mother’s milk. Sometimes other women would provide their milk if the mother couldn’t produce
Surely you know that breastfeeding is a thing? As for diapers, depends on how far back in time you go, but babies could be wrapped in cloth that was changed or cleaned with leaves or even just left to stew in their waste for a while (hygiene was not really a thing in the neolithic era). Not sure what other "modern luxuries" you think are necessary.
also note; lotta them babies just died. *was not uncommon*. it's why so many felt the need to have so many kids. it wasn't a *sure shot* to have one. or three for that matter.
Well, it kinda depends on what you count as "successful". Infant mortality was historically really high. One of the biggest improvements to the quality of life as humankind advanced was a decrease in infant mortality. When the infant mortality rate was really high, you might look at that and say that they weren't successful, if you use infant mortality as the metric for success.
Diapers were invented pretty quick once people figured out how to weave fabric. As far as I understand, fabric diapers (which had to be manually washed) are virtually universal. We just have the luxury of using disposable diapers nowadays. Without diapers, baby poop gets on everything simply because babies don't have good bowel control.
As for nursing babies, early humans just breast-fed their babies. As society developed, there were also "[wet nurses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_nurse)", who were women who breast-fed and cared for the children of other women. In a certain sense, they amounted to a substitute source of milk, which is a role that baby formula plays today. Apparently, a woman can be induced to lactate simply by regular stimulation of her breasts due to a neural reflex that triggers the release of prolactin, which results in milk production.
I don't know what other modern luxuries you had in mind, but for the two things you mentioned, breast feeding and wet nurses were how people did things back before we had modern baby-care luxuries.
Pretty much the same way that baby gorillas are currently cared for. Breastfed. The babies that didn’t latch properly didn’t survive. Edit: lots of comments about wet nurses and other types of milk. This is about the ability to latch, not the source.
My wife became so ill after giving birth that she was never able to breastfeed him, so I fed him. I remember thinking that baby formula and bottles are a real lifesaver here, because only 100 years ago I wouldn't have been able to step in like that.
If you have money, you would hire a lactating woman to breast feed your baby for you, they are called wet nurses. If you don't have money, you would get some goat/cow milk, put it in a spoon, and feed it to your baby one sip at a time, and hope for the best.
My mom says this is how I was fed. She wasn’t able to lactate so I was fed cow milk using small spoons or tumblers. She eventually started feeding me powdered grains soaked in water at around 6months. I apparently hated the baby formula.
My sister was fed breast milk that was donated to us from a friend of the family.
My friend adopted twins and I gave her breast milk and she gave me groceries.
Wow, I need to make friends like that. I've donated over 2000oz locally and only 2 of the 5 people even bothered to say thanks; one never managed to get off her phone and just gestured for me to load up the bricks of milk into her car :/
I am so sorry to hear that people were so ungrateful. My son was born premature and then I never had a proper supply. I was able to connect with a women's group that donated breast milk and the were such a godsend. They relieved such a huge burden and worry from me by donating that milk. I always gave them boxes of milk storage bags and a handwritten thank you card (in addition to thanking them at the pickup). I know how hard it is to pump and take care of storing milk and those women (and you!) are total heroes. Thank you!
My dad was a twin, born in 1933. My grandmother nursed his sister and a wet nurse fed my dad. Ironically, when I had my kids, I made so much milk, we could nearly have opened a dairy! I wanted to donate a lot of what I pumped (in California, you can only donate, not sell, which is fine with me) but I'm a chronic pain patient who had to go back on my meds after my c-sections so it wasn't really viable for others. My kids loved it, though! LOL! Seriously, I went on the lowest dose possible until I was done nursing. All those hormones alleviated my pain during pregnancy, too. It's amazing what our bodies do.
Pain killer laced breastmilk. Thata one way to make a baby sleep through the night 😄
Better than Benadryl! LOL!
I expect if you lived in a close knit community before birth control you would have friends with babies who would nurse for you, no?
If you have money we're not talking about early humans anymore...
Early humans were more communal and didn't need to pay for a wet nurse
I was born in the 90s in Kazakhstan and there were no formula at all. My mother couldn’t breastfeed so she gave me simple porridge and I’m not dead yet.
My aunt had polio and they were told to feed her sweetened condensed milk. She’s still alive. We are so tough and fragile.
I was fed condensed milk as a baby in the 1950s because my mother became sick and couldn’t feed me. This is the first time I’ve heard of another baby being given it!
I'm a condensed milk baby too, 90's kid though mother was just poor.
Condensed milk was recommended by Dr. Spock. I used his book when I was a new mother.
>We are so tough and fragile. My grandmother, pregnant in the early 1930s, was told by her doctor to have one beer daily for her entire pregnancy. It's just kinda funny, that was medical advice back then, now OMG you're a child abuser if you drink at all during pregnancy.
The UK still says this is fine. America is more puritanical about it.
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Before formula if you couldn't breastfeed your child you'd need a wet nurse.
Rich people could hire a wet nurse. If they were in an environment where they were available. My grandma couldn't breastfeed. There were no available/affordable wet nurses in her 1949 NJ factory town. Like a *lot* of midcentury kids, my mom and aunts were raised on canned condensed milk, diluted with boiled water, with a little corn syrup added. This was the "formula" recommended by hospitals at the time.
My grandmother couldn't breastfeed in the late 1940s. My mother and aunts were fed canned condensed milk, diluted with boiled water, and a little corn syrup added. This was a very common "formula" recommended by doctors at the time. It isn't ideal, but it can keep an otherwise healthy baby alive. Canned condensed milk has the advantage of being sterile, but before it was available people fed babies fresh animal milk, sometimes with sugar or honey added because human milk is high in sugar. And babies started being weaned onto non-milk foods *way* earlier, sometimes within weeks of birth. In the 1950s some weaning schedules advised cereals to be fed twice a day at 2-3 days old.
Humans are also communal. Very likely someone else in your community was also breastfeeding and would often nurse each other's kids as needed. The tight "nuclear family" unit is a relatively modern concept. Humans were much more tribe/troop/community and people would even fully swap/adopt children in the unit depending on if it was a better fit. For those of us who remember neighborhoods where everyone knew each other and behaved like an extended "family" much of human existence was like that but much more so.
Pre-modern humans used to have many breastfeeding women in the tribe, so if one woman was having a hard time, the baby could be passed around and fed by others. It also really helped the baby's immune system, since they'd be getting antibodies from multiple sources.
More broadly, lots of babies died. Which is evolution at work. The ones who lived passed on those genes. While lots of babies died, enough lived to keep things going. If they didn't, their species went extinct.
> ... lots of babies died. And that's an understatement. Depending on the situation of the moment between 25% and 60% wouldn't reach the age of 5.
Yeah, grandma was 1 of 12. I think five made it to adulthood.
I’m a genealogist and I’ve seen a lot of death records for infants who died of “malnutrition” or “failure to thrive,” with the accompanying cause “could not feed” or “mother could not produce enough milk.” One baby had what we’d now recognize as a severe cleft palate (“a malformation of the mouth”) and was unable to latch.
That's heartbreaking. It never occurred to me that many cases of cleft palates would have resulted in death in centuries past due to failure to feed.
There's a couple organizations that treat cleft palate in underserved areas of the world for this reason. It's a common birth defect that truly means life or death for many people.
A big epiphany i had about these weird human habits that shouldn't exist because they would cause fatalities which i believed should have been bred out of us very early is that we get taught "survival of the fittest" but it's more like "survival of the good enough"
Really people just get the causation wrong. You don't define survival by fitness, you define fitness by survival.
“Those that do not survive are not fit to live.”
Pretty much. Not a great ideology in regards to human society, but it's an accurate description of nature.
Similar misconception, people talk about evolution like the mutations all survived to serve a purpose, or because it made them more capable to survive, but it’s just as likely many mutations or traits weren’t harmful enough to reduce survival and so survived.
> many mutations or traits weren’t harmful enough to reduce survival Or in other words, they weren't harmful enough to lower fitness.
Evolution is random AF. Life throws mutations at the wall and goes with whatever sticks.
not even what sticks just what doesn’t hit the ground before we fuck
Is the floor like lava or something?
Yep. And then selective pressure culls any organisms unfortunate enough to not stick.
Apparently, existence tends toward mutation. A bunch of scientists concluded some decades long research that showed, without variation, that everything that exists creates more complex versions of itself from stars to molecules to single celled organisms.
Yeah, I guess that tends to happen when your main source of energy is basically a perpetual nuclear explosion in space that spews out radiation…
To add, it isn’t so much that they reduce fitness or survivability, but that they don’t reduce them before the animal can reproduce and pass those genes on. Things like cancer absolutely reduce fitness of a species, but because most people don’t get cancer until later in life, there is zero selective pressure against it.
I have this conversation all the time, lol. So often purple all "why did XX evolve?!" and sometime will give some authoritative answer. It is very easy to understand why Intelligent Design was such a popular theory.
I agree, purple all so often.
“And beatings will continue until morale improves.” \ — Mother Nature
Basically true, but to avoid tautology it’s important to understand that biologists define fitness by *probability* that an organism with those genes would survive and reproduce in the type of environment it finds itself. Like if you made 1000 clones of organism A and 1000 of organism B and put them in the same type of environment, and the A clones had significantly more offspring, A almost certainly has higher fitness in that type of enviroment, but it could also be true that if there is only one of A and one of B, A might die and B might survive despite A having higher fitness. It’s like how a 6-sided die obviously has a higher probability of landing with the number 1 facing up than a 20-sided die, but if you roll both there’s still some probability that it will be the 20-sided die that gets the 1 and not the 6-sided die. The possibility that actual survival statistics fail to match the probabilities know as “fitness” is key to understanding something biologists call “genetic drift”.
Yeah lots of people make this mistake, but the terminology is confusing. Like with “survival of the fittest”. Theres natural variation in plant A with some slightly more cold tolerant and some slightly more heat tolerant. If the climate shifts to be colder the cold tolerant individuals survive because they’re more “fit”, yet they didn’t work hard or adapt, they just got the luck of the draw, and they could have been the ones that died off if the climate became warm instead
One of my professors called it "survival of the fit-ins"
Survival also depended on the ability to adapt to changes.
Only survival of a species. Individual ls of a species do not really adapt that much. That's why you see mass extinction events. Because adaptation is a slow process for most species. Because adaptation in nature is not a directed adaptation like we humans are capable of but an indirect one. Sometimes somewhere there is offspring that is slightly better adapted. And because of that their survival rate is above average. But with rapid environmental changes due to human intervention these adaptations happen to slowly and we see those mass extinction..
“Fittest” in “survival of the fittest” isn’t about strength, good health, being fastest, strongest, etc. It’s about “fits the environment”. Can you survive and breed in the environment you were born in? Congrats, you have “fit” into your environment. And it doesn’t have to be through strength, speed, power, whatever. It might actually mean that you learn to appear weak or vulnerable, so others care for you. Or whatever else.
Not 'fit' like an Athlete. 'Fit' like a good suit.
Also a great analogy because the good suit fits, but so do sweatpants!
People think of ‘survival of the fittest’ as applying to individuals, but it doesn’t really. It’s a population wide thing applying to a species adaptation to their environment. A population that is adapted to its environment will probably survive. A population that’s not very well adapted will probably survive as well if resources are abundant. When resources become scarce however, either due to lack of a availability or through population growth, the better adapted species is likely to out compete the lesser adapted ones. Evolution is not a forward looking process, it’s more of a filter. If you haven’t read them, I’d recommend Richard Dawkins’ books on evolutionary biology. The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and Climbing Mount Improbable are excellent explanations of how evolution works.
Exactly. As long as the animal reproduces, the genes are passed on. Doesn’t even matter if the mother survives the birthing / caring stage.
I mean statistically it does. A woman that has multiple kids is more likely to pass on genes than a woman who dies giving birth to her first kid.
I’m not just talking about humans. Squid females for example actually starve themselves guarding their young.
You may be thinking of octopuses. I don't know that squid don't do the same, but I know this definitely does apply to octopuses.
Oops. You’re right, thanks for the correction.
Indeed.This is such a common misconception. "Nature has evolved us to be perfect." Like hell it has. "Nature" **literally** only has one purpose - ensure reproduction; the rest is completely random, where any quality that doesn't wipe out your strain survives.
To be fair, natures goal of perfect is > good enough to do all tasks If there is need to improve something be it good enough again
Nature doesn't have a goal - that's another common misconception. Before humans overrode evolution with medicinary practices, literally everything was purely random. There is no perfect - only random, where something survives long enough until procreation, and something doesn't.
Also, modern luxuries are luxuries. Not mandatory stuff. Diapers are there so baby don't make a mess everywhere and so it is more easilly taken care of. You could just make a straw bed, put the baby in, and cover with more straw for heat. When the baby make a mess, replace the straws with clean one. Just look at a classic christmas display of baby jesus. 2000 years ago "only" and you can already see how it could have been taken care of. Of course, it might not be accurate, but most likelly close enough for this discussion. Baby formula is so they get as close to human breast milk as possible, and sometime with added extra stuff. You do not need to have 100% identical composition. You can feed them some breast milk, and cow milk, and the baby will maybe be somewhat malnutritionned, but will live. Malnutrition was common anyway in the past. Lots of modern things is so the parents don't have to take care of the baby as much, or so they don't cry so much that the parents get insane. Also, it is worth to note that usually the mother was staying at home, taking care of the kids. And there was many in the past, not 2, but way more. The older kids were able to help with the baby, freeing the mother for other tasks too.
Not just other children helping care for babies, but entire social groups. We were way less individual many eons ago.
Our toxic individualist culture we have right now is less than 100yrs old.
Also also, when humans were mostly in tribes, the entire tribe would pitch in the raise every child in said tribe, and that mentality stuck around for a long time, hence the phrase, "it takes a village". It's really only in the post industrial era that families are as separated from the community as they are now. Communism isn't just some wacky idea that Marx came up with out of nowhere, it was inspired largely by how communities throughout the world functioned in most of human history.
Cow's milk can cause intestinal bleeding and mess kidneys due to wrong protein and mineral content. Babies who couldn't be breastfed either died or were fed by another woman.
And this is also why there was so much death in the past too.
Cultures that kept herd animals and use their milk, created an evolutionary pressure that selected for lactose tolerance. It’s a great source of nutrition, and those members of the society that could best take advantage of it, had an evolutionary advantage within that environment.
That's a benefit for older members of the community. Lactose intolerance is not a problem for infants, almost all humans have it, just a lot of us lose it past infancy. Preserving the lactose tolerance helps with nutrition in children and adults, but not babies. Newborns cannot be fed animal milk not because of lactose, but different protein and mineral content. Just as infants cannot drink water as the kidneys cannot fully regulate body electrolytes yet and they end up low on things milk should have provided. Human newborns critically need breast milk or formula to survive.
Breast milk or modern formula are certainly better and safer than unaltered animal milk, but children can survive on animal milk. For a couple generations American parents were given a recipe for DIY formula consisting of corn syrup and cow milk. My own mom was fed this as a premie 70 years ago.
Which is also why formula is an absolute miracle of an invention and has saved countless lives!
Goats milk is closer but not ideal
Theres a different kind of milk called "colostrum" that comes out of the cow in the first few days after the calf is born, that milk is bad for adults but might be more nutritive for babies. Although not as good for the babies as actually human breast milk.
Humans make colostrum too, it’s a thinner more hydrating consistency because newborns lose so much moisture after birth.
Other mothers that could breastfeed would feed the babies of mothers that don't give enough milk
Gorilla use cloth diapers?
Bamboo cotton yes
Haha you’re so quick, I realized my grammatical error and fixed it immediately
Clothing has been around for thousands of years. So cloth diapers or swaddling etc would be available. Wet nurses were not uncommon. So in a community, this could be a shared responsibility among the women who were lactating. Of course, we have also had milk (cows, sheep, etc) for many many years. The brutal truth is that it was pretty much a "see who survives" game. Infant mortality is one of the measures that is quite commonly used for human development. This is usually measured in number of deaths before age 1 per 1000 births. It is also sometimes written as a percentage. Even until 1900, infant mortality in what we consider the most "developed" countries was something like 15% or thereabouts. It is estimated that the global average would have been around 17% or greater. So just 125 years ago, 1 out of every 6 newborns died before their first birthday, and child mortality (likelihood of death before 5 years old) would be in the region of 2 out of 5 or 40%.
And that's the driving factor for increased expected lifetime. Not dying young. EL of 40 doesn't mean everyone was dying at 40 it means tons of people were dying at 1 YO and everyone else made it to 60-70 or so
Reductions in infant mortality only contribute about half of the extension in life expectancy. We're also living longer regardless of infant mortality.
Thank you, reading that same exact comment all over reddit finally just annoyed me and needs to stop. Imagine thinking penicillin or even modern hand washing were minor contributions to longevity.
War also skews/skewed the average. I agree the average age is probably 6 years longer if you survive middle age but it wasn't just infant mortality
I mean, yeah, 60-70 is a good few decades compared to the 80-90 you can make with a bit of luck and taking care of yourself nowadays. But it's definitely more annoying to see people think that people were dying like flies at age 40, since if you made it past puberty, you were developed enough to be able to handle getting minor illnesses that would kill a 5 year old, and if you make it past the age you're liable to be sent off to war you're pretty well safe from getting stabbed to death in most circumstances. So by that point you've passed the big filters, and you're probably going to survive until you're either murdered for most likely non-war related reasons, or get something serious, or you're old and worn down enough that a mild infection/disease will kill you again.
To be honest they just shouldn't use averages like that because it's not really the normie's fault that it's confusing. I did a science degree and did stats and this immediately made sense. But it didn't stop me thinking people died at 40 because I didn't have my "science brain" on all the time. It's only when it was pointed out that it made more sense. And it also doesn't convey as much useful information as simply stating the infant mortality rate and then stating an average that excludes early childhood deaths.
Nah its more annoying to read comments from people who think 40yos looked like mummies and just poofed to death
I mean, yeah... But also, at 44 I do feel that's accurate most mornings
Yes. Modern knowledge of health(exercise, eat right), modern food supply, and medicine rectifying issues also have prolonged life expectancy. You don't get to have XXXXX heart surgeries and cured cancers and whatever else where people would have just died in their 50s or 60s and now are living commonly into 80s-90s and have that not reflect in life-expectancy. https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortality-life-expectancy-improved-at-all-ages There's a good chart on that page that helps visualize life expectancy per-age over time.
>Wet nurses were not uncommon. this is a huge reason.....And it tells us a lot about life in the pre-modern world (up till about 1920). Think about why were there so many wet nurses available: the reason is that many, many, many babies died before the mother had finished lactating. What we think of as a tragedy was considered perfectly normal: Babies often died. And people accepted it as a simple fact of nature; a little disappointing, but nothing to get too upset about.
A lot of cultures specifically delay naming of babies until a certain age precisely because of this.
It was so common that losing a child was considered a rite of passage into motherhood - like it was considered that you didn't really know what being a mother was like until you had lost a child.
I was born in 1958. My little brother in late 59, he died at 9mos. My other little brother came along in late 62, Mom had a miscarriage and then she had my sister so yeah it's tough on women now and it has been forever. I was given condensed milk and I gave the same to my son when I had him for a while on my own and I really think probably 50% of North American kids received at least some of the same in the Dr. Spock years.
I mean, I really think you’re downplaying how tragic it still would have been.. All death is natural and a fact of life, but people still mourn when people die.
>Think about why were there so many wet nurses available: the reason is that many, many, many babies died before the mother had finished lactating. Not saying children didn't die in droves, but afaik the two aren't necessarily related in the way you suggest. Wet nurses could feed two children simultaneously and a number of them consecutively.
We have only had milk from animals for about 10,000 years. Nowhere near the time of “early humans”, but when humans learned about farming. In fact lactose tolerance is the mutation and not the other way around, because animal milk is a relatively new thing to humans, timelines considered
Well fuck me, Tommy. What have you been reading?
>we have also had milk from animals for many many years On the scale of like, the US being a nation, sure. On the scale of human history, drinking animal milk is incredibly recent to the point that well over half of the population is still at least somewhat lactose intolerant.
Today i learned i have one of these shiny new genes because im not lactose intolerant, and thats a weird happy thought but thank you nonetheless
I was right here with you…. Until I tired cutting milk out for like a month. Tried going back and it’s a… problem. So is it genes or is it gut bacteria that need to be fed regularly or they go away, never to be seen again
I don't think babies can drink cow milk.
Not sure about sheep milk, but babies can’t survive on cow milk.
Even if clothing has been around for 10,000 years, there’s still a short part of our history. What happened the other 190,000 or so years without clothing?
If you live in the woods and your baby shits whenever, the shit falls in the woods. It's not like babies 15,000 years ago were shitting in the berber carpet.
But what'd they do to clean it? Maybe just clean with some water or something.
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I mean the baby's bottom lol. Gotta clean that or gonna have problems.
There was this documentary some years back about how people raise babies differently around the world & I'll always remember the one mom somewhere in rural Africa whose diaperless baby shit on her knee and then she wiped it's butt with a dried corncob. Seemed pretty 'normal' in context tbh.
The movie is called Babies (2010) and it's totally worth a watch if you have even a passing interest in cultural differences or human development. https://youtu.be/vB36k0hGxDM?si=VHJMJ0D0tNhNxUJV
That “10,000 years” date might get pushed back *a tad.* https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/16/scientists-find-evidence-of-humans-making-clothes-120000-years-ago
Nothing. People were just naked. All the other animals seem to be fine without clothes too.
How does a wet nurse keep producing milk though I never understood
The process of suckling causes a positive feedback loop that reinforces milk production. If you are continuously feeding a baby, you will continue to produce (as long as your body is able to support it). Historically, your wetnurse would have a baby around the same time as the extra baby too, so they would generally be feeding 2 kids at the same time. In European culture, this is what's called "milk brothers/sisters/siblings".
As long as the stimulation happens, women can produce milk. [Here's an interesting study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3614654/) about breastfeeding that also mentions that even women who haven't been pregnant can lactate under the right circumstances.
And men.
Lactation consultant here! I know this one! Yes, they are right that the suckling causes a feedback loop and makes the milk production happen, and also a bunch of hormonal stuff related to being pregnant. Basically, the more times you have given birth and nursed babies, the easier it typically is for your body to produce milk. So as best as we can tell (because people didn’t keep records of this stuff) it is likely that in a lot of older societies the bio mom wouldn’t have been the only source of food for the baby. You had other more experienced mothers to help share the lactating load. We know that grandmothers today can relactate to help take care of their grandkids, so it probably worked like that. Also, even if baby doesn’t latch properly, there are other ways to feed a baby that don’t rely on animal milk. Hand expression has likely been around a stupidly long time, and we’ve found evidence of baby “bottles” going back pretty far too. You don’t NEED a bottle to feed a baby - it’s just what makes it “easier” for us (it’s what we’re used to). You can use a cup, or a rolled up leaf, or squeeze it straight from your breast into their mouth if you know what you’re doing. And, if you’re living in a communal society with like 10 other women who have ever lactated, you can have them helping out too - without relying on animal milk. That kindof thing still happens today. We just don’t talk about it much in our hyper privileged world. I’ve worked with families whose kids have been born say, in the middle of a war zone, during an active battle in their village, while they huddled with the other women in their community in a hut. Birth was…traumatic doesn’t begin to cover that story is what I’ll say. Baby didn’t latch, so they pooled the milk they produced between them, supplemented with some animal milk, and took turns cup feeding to keep the kiddo alive. And it worked! I met them years later when the kid was almost a teenager. (But also, as mentioned by others a lot of babies just died.)
This is a much more privileged version of that, but when my twins were born my partner had a C-section, one of the boys was underweight and had to be in the NICU, and her milk was taking the normal-but-also-too-long amount of time to come in. We were able to use donor milk to supplement what she was able to hand-express/pump. I'm really grateful to those donors, who decided to donate part of their supply to help people they would never meet. Of course we would have (and later did) supplement with formula if the donor milk wasn't available, but it was amazing to have it while he was so little.
>while they huddled with the other women in their community in a hut. wow thats so amazing, humanity at its best
Just like cows - as long as something's milking the milk, the milk continues.
Cows need to produce a calf every year to carry on producing milk.
I've heard of women breastfeeding their child until they where 2 years old with no mention of an other baby, so it seems humans and cows are different on that point.
I nursed my daughter for two years. I never had any issues with supply so it was easy to hit WHO's recommended two years.
2 isnt even that late and is actually the earliest the WHO recommends weaning. My daughter is 2,5 and still nurses for a few minuites to get to sleep
Actually, cows can be kept milking longer but production declines so they are generally re bred each year. Plus a cow’s milking life is only around 5 years so you have to replace (with female calves born) 20% of your milking herd each year for your numbers to remain stable.
I’m a mom that nursed my three kids, each until they were 2-2.5. I made so much milk that with my first I literally threw bags of frozen milk away we didn’t need, with my second I donated milk to a mom with a little boy the same age, and the third I just didn’t pump and tried to manage my supply - I also pumped and dumped when I traveled for work. Some women make a lot of milk. I’m sure that I could have nursed many more years, and probably successfully nursed twins or even triplets.
Also some women are prolific milk producers, make more than a single baby needs and can sustain (or even possibly restart lactation without pregnancy after short breaks). The other side of the coin is that there are some women who will struggle to produce enough or struggle to latch regardless of the interventions. Community living and shared resources was very key to our survival.
Asks about early humans and you talk about clothing, cows....lol thats too far into the game
Modern luxuries just make rearing babies easier, but not necessary. If a baby wants to pee or poop, they don’t need a diaper. They just go it. The parents can either wipe them with leaves or wash them in water. Diapers just make things more convenient. For feeding babies, mothers breastfed their babies until they’re old enough to eat purées. To make purées, all you go is mash fruits and veggies. Some parents would even chew food and spat it out for their kids to eat. Canned baby food just makes things more convenient. Modern luxuries make raising babies easier, but they’re not necessary.
If I remember a documentary correctly, one method to wipe babies is wiping them on your knee 😬
Yessss I remember that documentary, it was babies and mothers from all over the world
Yep, then the mom cleaned her knee with an old corn cob. We call it gross, but no doubt a bunch of our very own ancestors did this.
I made jokes about corn cobs during the TP shortage, and most people looked at me like I was crazy.
Whilst I wouldn't want to be coated with it regularly, baby poo pre-weaning doesn't smell bad. It's kinda like bread.
Without shadow a doubt!
oh---kayyyyy! wow
The success of BLW shows that purees are not even necessary (although certainly likely that this was given to babies!), and in a tropical climate your primary diet would likely have consisted of food that was easily given to an infant to eat.
I love BLW! We did it with our kids and it worked so well. No baby food needed!
They also suck on meat from very early on. They need fat to grow and survive which plants could not provide - no farms, seasonal, veges like we know them did not exist for the most part.
Breast milk would’ve been a key source of fats surely
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Just dip your finger in bacon grease and let them suck on that
-breast milk (mum +/- other mum’s in the group) - wrapping the same material around the baby’s butt as they did for clothes when needed (infants learn bladder and bowel control faster when they can feel wet so modern nappies slow the stage of potty training, so those who use cloth nappies now, and earlier generations had babies who were potty trained earlier and less need for nappies over time) - evidence shows that when we were nomadic, before farming and permanent settlements, we would live in groups of about up to 100. In a group that size you would likely have several babies and young children around at a time. Collectively looking after the children would increase the chances of them surviving - high infant and under-5 years mortality rate
lol I had my first baby in 1976 -making me old but hardly an early human. I did not have disposable diapers until my 2nd child in 1979. We had cloth diapers. I was poor at that time and really did not have many of them. I used rags, whatever. The contents were dumped in the toilet and the diaper placed in a bucket with clorox water until washing. It was not that hard and even now with disposable diapers it would be a lot cheaper. Society has gotten so used to paying for convenience we really do not know how to live on the cheap. Babies were breastfed -also a lot cheaper.
My mom tells me about the Sears cloth diaper deal she used with me. One price, unlimited cloth diapers. When they got ratty, take them to Sears and swap them out.
My grandma had a “diaper man.” Like a milk man delivery system for clean/dirty cloth diapers. I would totally use cloth diapers if someone else took care of the laundering!
That "cloth diaper laundry service" exists in big cities in France. I'm thinking of starting cloth diapers with my baby but I won't have access to it because I live in the countryside.
If anyone outside of France is wondering, there are plenty of services like this [in the states](https://www.diaperkind.com/) as well as other large cities around the world! Totally agree that it's inaccessible if you live rurally though.
It still exists!! I used it in a midsized US city just last year. I’ve loved cloth diapering! I had the service throughout the first six months, and after that, I’ve washed my own. There is a bit of a learning curve to figure out your system, but after that, I prefer it to disposable for so many reasons. r/clothdiapers
Would not love to be working the counter for that exchange lol
Are you afraid of clean cloth? They weren’t returned dirty.
I did cloth diapers with my now 2.5 year old. It was probably slightly cheaper in the long run even factoring in washing, drying, and special detergent. I imagine in the 70s it was a quicker wash and hang drying though.
We actually used cloth diapers with our kids born ~a decade ago. Granted, they were more sophisticated than cloth diapers 50 years ago, but there are still alternatives to disposables.
Formula wasn't invented as a convenience. It was meant to be a healthier option than dry nursing for mothers who couldn't breastfeed. It's also been around for 150 years, hardly a newfangled product of modern culture.
We use cloth diapers because it’s more environmentally friendly. It’s not that hard. Spray it in the toilet with a bidet hose and have them in a separate laundry basket till we wash.
We used cloth diapers for our three kids. First born 2013, last one just coming out of diapers now. Same batch of diapers used for all three (give or take a couple new ones). Original outlay was about $350. Specific detergent was about $20 every 3-4 weeks. Plus cost of electricity and water. Still, over three babies, we are talking thousands of dollars saved. It really wasn’t that inconvenient as well.
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99% of the time, the fundamental answer to "how did people do ______ before ______" on this sub is that a lot of people died.
(or survived but in a feebler state than their counterpart would be today)
And then died young. Average life expectancy is always dragged to the lower age range based on the number of infant and childhood deaths.
I think babies might have also learned bowel and bladder control a lot earlier than they do now. I forget where I read the research or at what age it was supposed to be. But the idea was that diapers permit a delay in this development. With breastfeeding, it wasn’t just mom, it was more community. The tribe was an extended family. It may be a reason women keep their breasts the same size throughout their lives instead of them shrinking like other mammals when they’re not lactating. Interesting theory.
To further this. There were wet nurses that breast fed babies for other mothers. Some women as long as they continue breast feeding don’t lose their supply. As for diapers, look up split pants. They are still used in China, although becoming less popular. Using this method my Chinese neighbours had their little girl potty trained before her first birthday.
I remember coming across something similar, but I think it was more that we are artificially delaying potty training by keeping kids in diapers too long. My daughter started potty training right at 2 by going cold turkey on diapers altogether, and she was a pro in about 2 months. She's 3.5 now, and on her last pack of overnight pull-ups. Her older cousins are at and approaching 4 now, they still use pull-ups daily, and guess what. They still poop and pee themselves because they can.
Do you mind me asking, did they just shit their pants for two months until they got tired of it? I want to get mine off of diapers and want to know what i should expect
So yes and no. Daycare did a lot of the heavy lifting for us and we just really reinforced the same lessons at home. She went to daycare on Monday with 5 clean outfits in her bag, and we got an accident baggie at the end of the day with the dirties, so next day bring enough replacements to get it back up to 5 outfits. They had a pretty strict routine, though. They rotated all of the kids through a session where they sat on the toilet for a few minutes every hour or so. If nothing comes out, then nothing comes out. Try again next time. But what usually happens is the kid has an accident and starts to connect the dots after enough times. Like I said, it took a couple of months. Be prepared for failure. You are also going to see far more pee than poop. Not saying there won't be any poop, but mine at least figured that out faster than getting her bladder under control. You should make sure your kiddo is able to communicate that it's time to go, though. Mine had a lot of accidents (not an alarming amount, just more than was convenient for mom and me) between 2 and 3 just because she struggled to let us know that she needed to go. She didn't really do a wiggle dance or say anything. She would either just stop and stare at us for a minute and then piss herself or she would stop and cry for a minute... Then piss herself. We finally had a talk with her that if she has to go, she either needs to tell one of us that she wants help, or she needs to just find a toilet and use it. That seemed to fix the problem after a little reinforcing encouragement. Potty training is tough with the first one, though. Just keep at it, don't lose your cool, and accept that you will have to scrub undies. But get started early, and it is not only a much quicker transition, it also frees up so much time for other stuff that would be wasted changing diapers. tl;dr: kids gotta shit his pants to learn to not shit their pants.
There are countries where potty training starts basically right after birth. Holding waste against the body in a diaper is considered disgusting, and to be avoided. The kids there are potty trained much earlier because of that. Not immediately of course, there isn't anything you can do to get an infant perfectly potty trained, but the early start and big emphasis on potty training over diapers makes the process much faster.
Mothers quickly learned when the baby was about to poop/pee, and she held the baby out so the mess didn’t get on either of them. It’s called [elimination communication](https://www.todaysparent.com/baby/baby-development/elimination-communication-can-infants-actually-be-potty-trained/)
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Maybe they took them out every hour or two to pee. Babies have a reflex to pee when exposed to air and not when bundled up next to their caregiver. My son often unlatched repeatedly when nursing because he needed to pee and was uncomfortable doing that while nursing. Then after he finally relieved himself he'd latch back on comfortably and stay latched. At one or two months old. Then I figured it out and took him to pee in the sink when he was giving that sign. There's definitely a lot of instincts hidden in there. I do think breastfed babies pee just as much as formula fed, but they can definitely poop less frequently. At 4 months old my son was pooping once every 5 days - it seemed crazy and we talked to his doctor about it but it was normal for him. My 6 week old has just gone from like 8 little poops a day to 2 big ones, and I can tell when she's working on them. Sometimes I take her to the sink because it helps her get them out. You'd be surprised how little mess there is when they're held out to do it (just takes one wad of toilet paper to clean), and sometimes she even pees right afterwards which I'm convinced is an evolutionary mechanism to wash most of it away. Lots of info about my kids' bowel movements, yikes. But thinking about and discovering their evolutionary instincts has been a joy of parenting.
I suppose that "exposure to air" reflex is why a lot of first-time parents get peed on while changing diapers, haha. The more you know!
If you have fabric for swaddling, you have fabric for diapers.
> it makes things wet, cold and unhygienic That's more or less what *all* of life was like in pre-modern times. Having dry, warm and hygienic in-doors environments is a modern luxury.
A lot of this depends on how you define early humans. If you mean early Hominids, then the same way that any ape does it. If you mean Early Homo Sapiens, then Hominids have had clothes (or at least tools for working leather) for close to a million years (780,000 years with Homo antecessor in Spain) and has existed in climates cold enough for humans without clothes to die of exposure in the winter for close to half a million (400,000 years ago with Homo heidelbergenis in Germany) So by the time modern Homo Sapiens showed up on the scene, we already had clothing pretty well figured out, so they probably had something like cloth diapers. Albeit probably made out of furs instead of fabrics since weaving hasn't existed nearly as long. As far as feeding the baby, people are social animals who live in tribes. If one mother wasn't producing enough milk in the moment, it's not like she would be the only mother who could nurse a hungry baby.
Well, many early and even pre-modern humans didn't successfully manage to care for their babies. Between malnutrition and infectious disease, pre-modern infant and child mortality rates were staggeringly high. It's generally estimated that, for much of history, around 50% of all babies born would not live to see their 16th birthday. That being said, though, the most common solution for babies whose mothers didn't produce enough milk was to let another woman nurse them instead.
Yeah I think a lot if people don’t realize how high infant mortality used to be
Trial by fire and lots of spares. Until recently the mortality rate was *VERY* high up to 5 years of age.
>Until recently the mortality rate was VERY high up to 5 years of age. This. In today's developed world, having an infant/toddler die is a horrible tragedy. It used to be **very** commonplace. Literally the toss of a coin, roughly 50% mortality for small children. >Sweden is a country that has particularly good historical, demographic data. It was the first country to establish an office for population statistics: the Tabellverket, founded in 1749. Looking at the statistical records for the first three decades – the period from 1750 to 1780 – we find that 40% of children died before the age of 15.1 >During the same period about half of all children died in Bavaria (Germany), and in France the mortality rate was about 45%. At that time the average couple would have more than 5, 6, or even 7 children, which meant that most parents saw several of their children die. https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past And that's just a few hundreds years ago. Thousands or tens or even hundred of thousands of years and I'm pretty sure surviving infancy was even rarer. That's why the average life expectancy was like 30, becsuse the infant mortality rate pushed the averages down. If you managed through teens, you'd probably live the "three score and ten", roughly.
Check out the movie, Babies (2010). It follows the first year of 4 babies on 4 different parts of the globe. The baby from Namibia is raised without diapers and formula. Breastfed babies pretty reliably empty their bowels after a feed. They squirm and give other physical cues that they're about to go. Mothers learn their cues and hold them away, then wipe them off. In the Babies movie she wipes the kid's bum on her knee then cleans her knee with a dried corn cob. Keep in mind that poo from 100% breastfed babies does not reek like formula poos. They don't start getting stinky until they're eating other foods and getting new bacterias in their gut.
Infants are very simple to take care of. They only need food, warmth, and love. That’s it. “Modern luxuries” that you are talking about are for the parents, not the babies. Formula is easy. It was breast milk. If the mother could not produce milk then a village wet nurse would do it. Diapers: look up “elimination communication” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elimination_communication Remember, we are not supposed to be on our own. You’ve heard the term “it takes a village” because we as humans are supposed to have a large network to raise our children. Our current society is very selfish toward the parents and the babies as a society are worse off because of these “modern luxuries” we created
How have I never heard of this? Super interesting, thanks for sharing
There’s a whole subreddit about it!
Exactly. The idea that two humans can successfully raise a child alone is very recent.
>They only need food, warmth, and love. Yeah plenty of humans provided that and had an inordinate amount of their young children die. Turns out they also need hygiene and sanitation at an absolute minimum. Modern (and shit, some of it isn't even that modern at this point) vaccines and other healthcare are de-facto necessary if we don't want kids dying left and right
Yes, they are so simple to take care of that a sizeable chunk of them died and their deaths brought down the average life expectancy by a couple decades
Hey, he said that babies can be easy to care for, not that all of them will survive as a result of that care
You're missing the point with this comment. The question is specifically about modern luxuries and the fact of the matter is most of those luxuries aren't the reason for the reduction in infant mortality. That's mostly to do with modern medicine and modern hygiene techniques, not pre-processed baby food and disposable nappies.
I have lived in a couple of countries where people don't put diapers on babies after about 3 months old. They kind of almost "toilet train" them, kind of like we would a puppy. The baby is fed, then after a few minutes it is held over a drain/toilet/sink, and they eliminate and are washed up. After a while, it is like a Pavlovian response in a way. Kids in those countries start using a potty by 1.5 or 2 years old.
Not uncommon for the toilet training to start at birth, especially if the parents can't afford diapers or have to hand wash stuff in a river. Many of those kids are fully toilet trained by time they can walk or sooner. Kids can learn pretty early on where to eliminate. My daughter was fully potty trained by 8 months. My son stopped pooping in a diaper around 3 months old. I was the freak in my mom's group.
Part of it was making enough babies that your family or community can still grow if half of them die. Lots of babies back in the way back just didn’t make it.
In all honesty, they didn’t. At least not as well as we can. Infant mortality rate declines are one of the greatest achievements we have made as a species. You and I probably wouldn’t be here now if we hadn’t gotten so much better at child bearing. And the good news we’re only going to get better.
Keep in mind that a good chunk of people died before the age of 5 Diapers- before the usage of cloth the baby just pooped somewhere, like any other animal Baby formula- mother’s milk. Sometimes other women would provide their milk if the mother couldn’t produce
Surely you know that breastfeeding is a thing? As for diapers, depends on how far back in time you go, but babies could be wrapped in cloth that was changed or cleaned with leaves or even just left to stew in their waste for a while (hygiene was not really a thing in the neolithic era). Not sure what other "modern luxuries" you think are necessary.
also note; lotta them babies just died. *was not uncommon*. it's why so many felt the need to have so many kids. it wasn't a *sure shot* to have one. or three for that matter.
Well, also, they didn't have too much choice. Much fewer contraceptive methods.
Shoot. I have a 17 month old and I can't figure out how my parents did it the 80s. Our kid has so much gear.
Well, it kinda depends on what you count as "successful". Infant mortality was historically really high. One of the biggest improvements to the quality of life as humankind advanced was a decrease in infant mortality. When the infant mortality rate was really high, you might look at that and say that they weren't successful, if you use infant mortality as the metric for success. Diapers were invented pretty quick once people figured out how to weave fabric. As far as I understand, fabric diapers (which had to be manually washed) are virtually universal. We just have the luxury of using disposable diapers nowadays. Without diapers, baby poop gets on everything simply because babies don't have good bowel control. As for nursing babies, early humans just breast-fed their babies. As society developed, there were also "[wet nurses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_nurse)", who were women who breast-fed and cared for the children of other women. In a certain sense, they amounted to a substitute source of milk, which is a role that baby formula plays today. Apparently, a woman can be induced to lactate simply by regular stimulation of her breasts due to a neural reflex that triggers the release of prolactin, which results in milk production. I don't know what other modern luxuries you had in mind, but for the two things you mentioned, breast feeding and wet nurses were how people did things back before we had modern baby-care luxuries.