I was a bit disappointed when I realized how far behind giraffes Emily is, but then I found out that the gestation period of a giraffe is between 400 and 460 days, compared to around 280* for humans. This means that a giraffe has had 57-65 weeks to develop before it's born, whereas a human has only had 40 weeks. So a 1 day old giraffe has been developing for as long as a 4-6 month old baby. This still puts giraffes way ahead of humans, since I have never heard of a 4 month old baby that could walk, or even stand.
This has me wondering whether a baby that stayed in the womb for 60 weeks would come out with legs strong enough to hold their own weight. While I was mulling this over, it occurred to me how silly this whole debate is to begin with. I'm comparing apples to oranges here! I don't know why it didn't occur to me before, but giraffes walk on four legs and people walk on two. The coordination required to balance on two legs has got to be significantly more sophistocated. So to even the race a little, I should be comparing a giraffe baby that can walk to a human baby that can crawl, and from what I can tell, human babies usually learn to crawl somewhere between 6 and 9 months. So if you compare a giraffe that stays in the womb for 65 weeks to a 6 month old baby that has learned to crawl, they're actually at about the same point developmentally. Of course, after that, the human leaves the giraffe in the dust by learning to do things like dance, read, operate cell phones, drive cars, etc. So in the end, I guess we are the more advanced species after all.
*I think this number is actually high, because it represents a period of 40 weeks, which technically includes 2 weeks before conception. It might be a moot point if a similar method is used in calculating animal gestation periods, but I don't know.
