From seed spitting goats and pom pom make-up to side-eyeing Chloe and the journalist who interviewed a buffalo, the Internet never ceases to amaze us. Recently, Facebook has managed to amuse millions of users worldwide with this video that features a baby girl, who starts walking immediately after birth.
Over 70 million views
Needless to say that the newborn has become an Internet sensation ever since.
The video has garnered over 70 million views and over 1.6 million shares on Facebook. The viral clip shows the unidentified newborn attempting to wrestle and Walk free as the midwife tries to give her a bath.
“Oh my gosh, the girl is walking. Good gracious!” the nurse exclaims in Portuguese as the staff members watch the tiny girl take her first footsteps. “She has walked from here to here,” she explains in the video, indicating the distance with her hands.
The bizarre scene was filmed by a hospital staff member who later shared the footage on the social networking site on May 26th.
Typically, a baby starts to walk between the ages of nine to 12 months
Most babies can’t even crawl before they’re six to 10 months old. Usually, newborn babies take up to 12 months to learn to walk, and certainly not before going through crucial development stages like learning hand to eye coordination, sitting up and crawling. So how did this Miracle Baby learn to walk so soon?
The most likely explanation is that the newborn tot in the viral video is displaying the walking or Stepping Reflex. It is a kind of primitive reflex action in which an infant attempts to walk if held upright, by putting one foot in front of another when the soles of their feet touch a flat surface.
The stepping reflex can be attributed to human's primitive instinct to move.
"The purpose of this reflex is to prepare a child to walk," explained Dr. Kenneth Wible, from Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics in Kansas City, in a Tech Times report.
According to the University of Rochester Medical Center, the reflexive urge to do this usually lasts for about two months after the infant is born.
Some mammals can actually walk right after being born
A baby giraffe can stand up and take its first steps within an hour after birth. In the case of horses, a foal attempts to rise within the first ten minutes of its birth and begins to walk within an hour after being born. Other animal species that can walk after birth include geese, porcupines, mountain goats and moose.