Hands-On

We spent the afternoon in a big garden-cum-aboretum. Many different varieties of leaf, branch, twig, flower to see and touch and smell. Butterflies, moving so fast, it is hard to follow them; dragonflies are even worse; bumble-bees are slower. Ladybirds are easier to see but hard to pick up. Grass on your bare feet is fine; stony paths are tricky, so are pine needles; we stayed well away from the holly trees. Sometimes pools of water are for swimming in, but not here

We went from tree to tree and touched all the bark. Smooth and ribbed and gnarled and this craggy one. They are so big; I feel so small. After all that, the best bit was the bare soil at the edge of the flower beds. It's dry and crumbly and broken up into tiny pieces that fit tiny hands. The gardeners have put a mulch on top, so handfulls of soil include tiny bits of wood, twig and leaf, even tiny stones to examine. You can give it to someone else, let it flow out of your hand and then take it back, and sprinkle it back into the bed, like rain

Mum says that one-year old children change the way they interact with food, becoming more hesitant and discriminating. They also become less inclined to put everything and anything they pick up into their mouth. There is a theory that this is evolved behaviour because one-year-olds are suddenly highly mobile, likely to stray further from their carer, even out of sight. In environments where some plants are poisonous, treating everything you find as potential food could reduce your chance of ever reproducing

The new BBC series about human evolution says that as the brain became differently organised, changed shape and expanded, to support the complex behaviour and phenomenal cognitive power of our species, the pre-reproductive phase of life - childhood - became longer and longer. Our survival strategy is an extended period of learning to use our minds to function in society, to create tools and to exploit our environment more effectively. So far it has worked - too well, you might argue. We still have a long way to go to beat the 2 million years that Homo erectus walked the planet

So much learning packed into one short afternoon; how will a couple of decades fit in one head?