And yet the human pace of life is anything but common. We are off-the-charts freaks among the animal kingdom when it comes to our life history, the rate at which we grow up, procreate, grow old, and die. We live life in slow motion. If humans lived like a typical mammal our size, we’d hit puberty before age two and be dead by twenty-five. Women would give birth every year, to five-pound babies. The average six-year-old would already be a grandparent. Daily life would be unrecognizable.
