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> consume so much energy that we give birth just before a women's metabolic limits would otherwise be overrun

Since babies traditionally breast feed and thus survive solely on the mother’s energy after birth, this explanation doesn’t seem to hold water.

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Breast feeding is quite hard on women and many women struggle to sustain the child on the breast alone. There’s a history of communal feeding which adds new energy into the equation and also mixed feeding once the child is old enough. I would say it’s probably a continuation at the peak metabolic rate described in the parent post.

Most women I know who struggled with breastfeeding were due to inability to have the baby correctly latched. Once the baby is latched, women shouldn’t have a problem with supply. Mother spends at most 500 calories extra when breastfeeding which most of the time comes from the weight that’s gained during pregnancy. I myself was able to exclusively breastfeed for 6 months after which we started introducing solids.

The truncated gestation is sort of taking that into account, at least according to this paper https://www.pnas.org/content/109/38/15212

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