Kangaroos do the same. To be fair, evolutionarily it makes sense. (They only do it when they have literally no escape, and the choice is either both of them dying or the kid dying, soo…)
I bet in pre-history it happened more often than not in humans, and within recorded history has likely happened more times than anyone would admit.
eeeh our whole evolutionary niche is to be so social that we’ll form bonds with a literal rock, i can’t see the vast vast vast majority of mentally healthy humans managing to do it, more likely they’d try to gently throw the child away from the danger and sacrifice themselves.
Yeah. We evolved to survive as a group. Not as individuals.
Kangaroos while they do sometimes form groups, are far far less social, and kids of dead parents aren’t adopted like what would happen in a human group.
Some of the skeletons that we’ve found from… basically the last ice age, some even further back, show humans (or proto humans) that had had badly fractured bones… but they healed up (not well by modern standards, but nonetheless), and then those bones grew, and the individual died at a much greater age than when the serious fracture occured.
… And these people are buried in graves, with grave goods, not just thrown out or left behind in the wild.
Strong evidence of early human groups actually giving enough of a shit about their members to take care of the wounded, helps to be able to date early societal formation.
https://kimwerkmeister.substack.com/p/the-first-sign-of-civilization-how
Empathy and responsibility to care for others are actually the literal foundation of human society and civilization, contra to Musk and all the fascists and Christian Nationalists recently claiming ‘empathy is a sin’.