Any bipedal species with a large brain will inevitably need some way to deal with the hard problem of how to bring new individuals into the world without killing one or both of the parties involved. Human biology has taken one extreme, frontloading all the risk onto the mother and forcing her to cram a massive skull through a comparatively tiny pelvis. The Kyanah have taken a drastically different strategy, laying eggs that are far smaller than a newborn human baby and thus don't require extensive modifications to the female pelvic structure or even significant risk; this process usually takes just minutes and it's usually possible to return to work (or to the hunt, in more primitive times) the very next day, with no ill effects. As saving resources is critical on their arid world, the egg structure is rarely (albeit occasionally, by mistake) formed unless fertilized, though with the right nutrition, the mineralization process is surprisingly quick, with a shell forming around the amniotic reservoir by the time the future hatchling is no more than a few hundred cells. If this mineralization does not occur due to a lack of fertilization, the amniotic reservoirs are simply reabsorbed and recycled; in fact, female birth control primarily works by preventing eggshells from coalescing. The eggs, which are generally laid in pairs as a redundancy system, though between 5 and 10 percent are singletons, are predominantly made not from calcium carbonate, but from the tougher and denser silicon dioxide (the same as their primary bone mineral, yet another adaptation to living in 1.4G), tend to have a greenish-brown camouflage pattern to hide them from ovivores. While lacking a continuous brooding instinct, they evolved to build sophisticated nests to trap in heat and keep the eggs warm, along with a thermally insulating amniotic fluid. In general, reproduction can be described as a hybrid of reptilian and mammalian systems, in that they only have one hole--the cloaca--but males still possess a penis-like structure, though technically this is actually a muscular hydrostat (a type of biological structure that on Earth includes tongues, elephant trunks, and cephalopod tentacles).
This whole reproductive strategy has massive repercussions on Kyanah and their development as hatchlings. Eggs hatch just 0.4 homeworld years (0.2 Earth years) after being laid, usually members of a pair hatching within a few hours of each other. An egg tooth, a small keratin spike protruding from their snout, helps them break out of their egg before falling off a few days after hatching, though the adults in their pack can help if they are struggling to break through. The hatchlings weigh on average 300-350 grams each, just one tenth the size of a human newborn; in fact, their entire body is about the size of a human newborn's brain. And therein lies the sacrifice, because they have an immense amount of physical and mental catching up to do, which requires an extreme and constant effort on the part of multiple adults, making the pack structure a crucial element of child-rearing. The vast majority of the risk is thus dumped on the hatchlings instead of the mother, though as they have relatively small numbers of children and expend great effort into caring for them and guiding them through the minefield of the first few years, they still count as K-strategists rather than R-strategists. However, it can't be denied that this is the most dangerous part of the Kyanah life cycle, and in pre-industrial times, the majority of hatchlings didn't make it--though the mortality rate at each of the first few years is roughly equal, instead of peaking in the first year. In modern times, the survival rate has increased to 96-99% in tier 1 city-states, and even in tier 4 city-states is over 80%.
The neural architecture of the Kyanah has been discussed already: a neural stalk to generate nerve signals from raw input, taking in sensory data and polymer "prompts" from their 6 cores, which are devoted to molecular data storage of high-level concepts and reasoning. This looks nothing like a human brain, with the only physical similarities being that they're roughly the same size at adulthood and sit inside the skull: the cores somewhat resemble 3-dimensional H-trees densely packed with meaty filaments down to the microscopic level and joined to each other and the stalk with connective tissue, while the stalk is more like a U-shaped rope of microscopically thin "spaghetti" strands coiled around each other; both have a grayish-purple hue). The stalk is partially pretrained by evolution, making it sufficient for low-level brain functions and basic gross motor skills, but not high-level reasoning or fine or advanced motor skills. Activating higher brain functions is thus the most important goal at this stage, and packs basically have to shovel as much training data into their hatchlings' faces as physically possible to take advantage of the critical early years, when the learning rate is high and the stalk is the most sensitive to new stimuli. Additionally, neurogenesis is not even finished by the time they hatch, and Kyanah continue creating new neurons throughout their stalk until well into childhood. Thus, this training requires not just constant presence, but constant active stimulation as well, with even brief periods of incorrect or nonexistent upbringing having disastrous consequences, and permanently damaging their neural architecture. Hatchlings thus need constant contact from their pack, even more so than older children or adults, and even the level of care afforded to human infants, which still includes long increments of passive care without active interaction, may well lead to serious developmental disorders or death. As the neural stalk trains and expands, the cores also activate immediately after hatching, filling the cores with countless ground truths and relations between distinct entities. Rather than being encoded in electrochemical signals or neural pathways, this information is encoded via direct molecular storage mainly in the form of PAMAM (polyamidoamine) dendrimers, branching tree-like polymers whose convoluted architecture works well for encoding large-scale structured data, and can be created and manipulated by analogs to the polymerases and editases used to manipulate genes. The exact "language" that maps dendrimer sequences to specific concepts is not fully understood, and likely varies between individuals, or possibly even between cores, taking into account not just the molecular structure, but also the positioning and rotation of branches. While hatchlings' eyes and ears are still developing when they hatch and don't open for days, olfactory and tactile data can still be used to start creating relations and ground truths immediately and encoding them in dendrimers; naturally physical touch and sound from others in their pack significantly accelerates this process, and the more frequent and varied the stimulation is, the more effective it is.
By around 1-1.5 years (0.4-0.7 Earth years), the hatchling phase nears its conclusion, leading to the start of the implet phase. At this point, their teeth will have arrived, making it possible to eat solid meat instead of relying on chewed up and regurgitated meat from their pack. Additionally, gross motor skills and mobility have increased, allowing nascent fine motor skills to start developing and hyper-accelerating the rate of accumulating ground-truth and relational dendrimers in the cores (though stalk learning rates continue to gradually decline from their peak right after hatching). Naturally, this requires training to become considerably more involved; constant interaction and stimulation remains critical, but even more thought and intellectual effort is required to make it work with the young Kyanahs' growing capabilities. This doesn't just giving their hatchlings toys and leaving them to play with them, but actively and repeatedly forcing exposure to these objects, and only when they get older and understand them inside and out, being left to use them on their own. They often learn by touching, and--reflecting their predatory and carnivorous instincts--chewing on them. Said objects are often intended to be "dumbed down" versions of tools that the hatchling is supposed to use so solve problems their pack creates for them in order to get rewards; both the "tools" and the problems get more complex with age. Adults and older children in the pack will often have to demonstrate this, allowing the hatchling's and implet's excellent mimicry skills to be fully utilized, and take, move, or otherwise manipulate toys or food to force them to calculate solutions to (age-appropriate) problems. While hatchlings don't eat solid food right out of their egg, instead eating regurgitated meat from their pack members until their teeth come in, but once they do, they aren't just spoon-fed (literally or metaphorically), but have to solve increasingly complex problems to get the food, until they've learned to feed themselves without intervention.
The near-ubiquity of eggs hatching in pairs also allows the pairs to become "adversarial learners", inadvertently helping to train each other by competing for a maximal share of the pack's resources. The pack's adults can step in if necessary to prevent this from getting too violent--providing an early form of social training--and also often play-fight in an age appropriate manner with their young. While at the hatchling stage, this is just intentionally slightly annoying touch, but at the implet stage, these maneuvers become more aggressive and tactical, requiring more sophisticated reasoning to defend against. While to a human it might seem cruel to take away food and toys from a baby or toddler, or intentionally irritate them, this is an important part of their neurological development, and skimping on it can lead to developmental problems down the line. In fact, this sort of adversarial training is often the fastest and most effective in the early stages of development. While it may be intense, this is balanced out by constant showering with affectionate touch; Kyanah are instinctively very touchy feely within their own packs (not so much between packs unless you have a death wish, but that's another story) and children are never sequestered somewhere or left alone, they're always in the middle of things, regardless of where the pack is or what they're doing; even adults in a pack don't usually willingly separate from each other for long. Cordoning children off in an environment like a crib or playpen would be seen as cold and neglectful except in an emergency, and sending them away to an environment like a daycare or school would be downright monstrous. In any case, the implet stage lasts from around 2-7 years (0.9-3.2 Earth years). During this phase, young Kyanah will often learn to recognize, speak, and read or write a fair amount of individual words, though full-scale language processing with complete sentences and fully-formed ideas doesn't yet come online. In addition, gross and fine motor skills often increase considerably, allowing sustained walking and deliberate manipulation of objects in increasingly sophisticated ways. In addition to mental growth, they are also playing catch-up with regards to physical growth in their early years. Right after hatching, they will often need close to half their weight in food each day, and the raw amount goes up over time, even if the proportion relative to body weight decreases. Thus, by 2 years (0.9 Earth years), they will have exploded to 8 kg and by 4 years (1.8 Earth years), it will be close to 14 kg.
By the imp phase, lasting from roughly 8-16 years (3.7-7.3 Earth years), Kyanah will usually have gained the ability to deliberately and consciously--rather than just subconsciously--construct mental trees and graphs to solve problems. This enables them to solve more complex and abstract problems, including simple math and unlocks fully-fledged linguistic ability, since Kyanah understand and process language in terms of binary parse trees rather than linear sequential sequences as humans do, so being able to explicitly create and manipulate mental trees is quite useful, even necessary, to process sentences with unlimited complexity. As a result, linguistic ability tends to explode with astonishing rapidity around this time, jumping from the level of a human toddler to a human 1st or 2nd grader in a matter of Earth months (~1 homeworld year). Given that Kyanah think in terms of trees or graphs rather than linear sequence, it should come as no surprise that the aforementioned "basic math" involves manipulating graph and tree-like structures rather than arithmetic; indeed, most only learn to count higher than 8 (the total number of fingers they have!) after being able to manipulate these basic trees and graphs, and tend not to get around to learning basic arithmetic until late in the imp phase--just a difference in priorities brought about by their nonlinear and relational thinking. As a result of this increased linguistic and mathematical ability, training tends to become a lot less intense and adversarial during this phase, as learning through speaking and reading becomes increasingly effective. Kyanah will learn to construct increasingly dense and wide mental trees and graphs during the imp phase, reaching densities and widths on par with adults by the end, though they still lack significant knowledge and maturity, and their ability to predict and influence other nodes in their social graph are not as well honed as adults. Motor skills gradually reach near-adult levels as the stalk learning rate continues to taper off, though they are obviously still smaller and weaker than adults, growing from an average of 21 kg to 45 kg (the same for either gender).
Additionally, story-threads, an important part of most Kyanah cultures, play a huge role in development. Story-threads are basically created by a pack collectively, with each member creating one thread and taking turns continuing their threads, which intersect each other to tell a story in a suitably nonlinear fashion for them to wrap their heads around. Though obviously many packs don't make their own, instead collectively reading and re-enacting ones written by other packs. Naturally, young children are there to observe while this is going on, and older ones will start being given simple roles to play in the story-thread, which is a common way to expand their vocabulary and also learn to read fully (as opposed to merely recognizing individual written words, which can be done earlier with suitable training). Obviously this is not something that every pack does, or directly involves their children in, but it does boost cognitive and linguistic development for those who do. Play-fighting also continues as a way of boosting motor skills and simply having fun, even if it isn't the main mechanism for learning and problem-solving.
After the imp phase is the subadult phase, typically said to run from 17-24 years (7.8-11.1 Earth years), though there is not a clear cutoff between subadult and adult, with adulthood simply being determined by whenever a Kyanah exits their hatch-pack and begins seeking a new one, and in practice, most subadults can probably physically survive on their own if they really have to. During the subadult phase, their ability to perform both conscious and unconscious operations on their social graph (including concepts like social chunking, being able to compress groups into a single node for social calculations) expands, as does the peak size of the social graph. This is important as they will soon separate from their hatch-packs and need enhanced social calculation ability to seek out potential packmates of their own and navigate around others. Kyanah will also undergo what is known as "dominance struggles" with their pairs or occasionally other siblings who are close in age; these are more complex than earlier play-fighting (but can include it to a limited degree) and tend to rely on socially rather than physically gaining the upper hand to establish and defend their position within the pack. This is quite useful as low-stakes practice for the social skills needed to draw in packmates and get a good position within their future packs--while there is usually no formal hierarchy beyond having a designated Alpha, except in some very old school and traditional packs, different members of a pack will still occupy different informal magnitudes and zones of influence, how an individual navigates this will have a ripple effect on their whole life, since packs are usually for life--for instance, Alphas of a pack are significantly more likely to reproduce than others, even in modern times, and have a larger (though not unlimited) say in professional, medical, and family-planning related matters. Even more crucially, relations with those outside their own packs (first hatch-packs, and later made-packs instead when they have those) will usually be transactional at best or adversarial at worst, so the jockeying for influence and resources won't be tempered by love, affection, or emotional attachment, making this sort of practice even more important to not be screwed over. Additionally, the subadult phase is marked by a gradually diminishing physical and emotional attachment to their hatch-pack; they will be increasingly willing to be apart or wander away from their packs for short periods as they transition towards adulthood, though being separated when they don't want to be can still have the same rapid onset of serious effects on mental health and cognitive function. At the beginning of the subadult phase, neurogenesis finally finishes and the neuron count in the stalk peaks and remains stable until old age.
Sexual maturity occurs in both genders around 20 (9.2 Earth years) regardless of gender and become physically capable of fertilizing and laying eggs. Notably, aside from reproductive organs, sexual dimorphism is much less pronounced than in humans, with many of the distinctions used to distinguish human genders being missing or irrelevant: no difference in size or strength, the entire species have not evolved any form of hair, hatchlings are fed by regurgitating food, any differences in skeletal structure need to accommodate for laying eggs are negligible, and clothing or accessories rarely if ever provide useful clues. However, during the subadult phase, the syrinx does develop slightly differently, leading to a slight but noticeable masculine and feminine accent, though this is partly susceptible to geography and upbringing, and there are some variations in their pheromone profiles from sexual maturity onwards, which are typically too subtle to be noticed by human noses, but are detectable to Kyanah at close range. It's possible that these traits evolved millions of years ago to help their distant ancestors recognize each other's genders to create a balanced pack, thus maximizing stability and genetic diversity, or that they're holdovers from sexually dimorphic ancestor species in the distant past. Interestingly, as Kyanah don't have a biological imperative for personal space or privacy within their own packs, and thus entire packs often prefer to live in a single room, most individuals will be well aware of how sex and reproduction work long before they have the opportunity to seek it out for themselves, and thus there's no widespread cultural phenomenon of explicitly explaining such phenomena to subadults.
The packless adult phase can be considered an in-between phase between childhood and proper adulthood. Without either a significant connection to their hatch-pack or a pack of their own yet, they are at their most independent and best at functioning alone (seeing as they have no choice), but this comes as a double-edged sword. Aside from packs, sources of non-transactional companionship and emotional or physical intimacy are scarce to nonexistent in most Kyanah societies, and jobs and roles in society are intended for packs, as packs are the atomic social building block rather than individuals, leaving the scraps for the packless. Being packless is something of a cold, hard, and lonely existence for most individuals. The middle-aged and older generations sometimes romanticize this time as a great equalizer, something that Kyanah from all walks of life have to suffer through, and emerge from it having found love. Though of course in reality, those who come from packs with money and connections have an easier time of it than those who don't, and in some cultures this can even lead to arranged packs, allowing them to skip the struggle partly or fully.
Naturally, creating or joining a pack will be the top priority of most packless Kyanah, second only to basic survival. Pack fragments, parts of a former pack that are too small to legally be considered a pack, don't have it much better and thus have many of the same biological urges. Packs don't come together all at once, but instead gradually come together in a process known as accretion; first two or occasionally three individuals will get on each other's radar and start to systematically cooperate on endeavors and gather information on each other. This gives them an advantage over lone individuals, as they are closer to forming a pack and have already demonstrated their desirability by showing that at least one other individual already thinks they are attractive and trustworthy to some degree, and thus they are able to be less indiscriminate; usually whichever individual is most responsible for drawing other Kyanah into the accreting pack tends to become the Alpha, but there are exceptions. Thus they draw in other individuals until they reach a critical mass of 4-6 where they have enough members and can safely reject almost anyone else who tries to join a full pack. As Kyanah aren't sexually dimorphic, gender does not play a direct role in this, nor in physical attraction (unlike in humans, sexuality isn't at all related to personal identity and is just something they can, and in quite a lot of cultures, have a moral duty to do, with the other adults in their pack) though there seems to be some biological imperative to keep packs at least somewhat balanced. In the meantime, the proto-pack continues to spend as much time as possible around each other in order to evaluate each other and establish their zones of influence. This process of pack accretion often bears little resemblance to human dating, even without taking into account the number of individuals involved. While the exact norms and traditions vary widely by culture, in Ikun's packless culture for instance, physically or emotionally intimate behavior, or coming across as vulnerable in front of each other, such as eating together or spending time in each other's dwellings (or even knowing exactly where they live in many cases), are uncommon before packs are fully formed, and time together (stereo)typically includes such things as teaming up in work-related tasks if applicable, or various games and sports against other packs or proto-packs to evaluate how they function as a unit in adversarial situations. Similarly, interest is often conveyed through a barrage of unprompted questions, which signal that one has enough interest to spend the time and mental energy doing an in-depth review of another individual or proto-pack's compatibility, to the point that hardcore flirting would sound more like an interrogation to human sensibilities. But the exact details of what is and isn't typical or appropriate vary widely across cultures.
Socially acceptable behavior and rituals during this period, including an acceptable level of physical or emotional intimacy for non-committed packs, vary widely by city-state and time period. But in general, the jump from a primarily transactional relationship where all parties are constantly spending time together to evaluate attraction and calculate compatibility to a purely emotional relationship where all parties are constantly spending time together because they feel overwhelming love and physically and emotionally depend on each other and are determined to spend their lives together, would seem to a human observer to be surprisingly abrupt compared to human dating, in some cases seeming to happen almost overnight once all the packmates have collected enough data through interacting with each other. However, on closer examination, one could definitely observe a period of decreasing willingness to be separated from each other or interact one on one with outsiders, coupled with increasing jealousy when outsiders attempt to interact with their other packmates, even while outwardly maintaining a somewhat reserved and calculating attitude right up until they don't. In addition to having a somewhat different character from human courtship, this process also takes place on a hyper-accelerated timeline; the average time it takes to go from separating from one's hatch-pack to having a pack that they will be with for life is just 3 years (1.4 Earth years), and less in highly structured environments like military training, where there is an incentive to match everyone to packs as quickly as possible, so they can be given a useful role in society. There may be a little bit of lag time between a pack being a de-facto pack and filing the paperwork to be legally recognized by whatever government they're under the jurisdiction of, but not much, generally day-blocks (weeks) at most and often just days; there's no sense in delaying legally committing and getting all the financial and legal boons that come with that. While there are no doubt societal factors at role in this, biology also plays a role, as Kyanah bodies tend to produce heavy doses of hormones and pheromones that effectively keep packs in the "honeymoon phase" indefinitely (or at least until they've grown old and raised any children they might have to adulthood). Combined with the general undesirability of being packless, and in many cases, cultural factors dissuading it, it is rare for packs to dissolve, but not unheard of.
Kyanah usually reach peak physical capabilities around 32 (14.7 Earth years) and maintain it until beginning a gradual decline in fitness starting around 56 (25.8 Earth years). By 80 (37 Earth years), their brain's cores will reach peak information storage, effectively indicating their intellectual peak (in terms of total knowledge and skills, uptake of new information will already be past its peak), and neuron decay in the stalk will start to outpace the rate of neuron creation, leading to a gradual decrease in motor skills and memory acuity. By 96 (44 Earth years), neuron loss in the stalk will accelerate, and the fidelity of the relation and ground truth storing dendrimers in the cores will begin to falter and decay, leading to the start of mental decline. Death usually arrives in 112-128 years (51-58 Earth years) due to various factors including accelerated loss of data in the cores or neurons in the stalk, or their hearts giving out from struggling against 1.4G for so long. Though advances in medicine have delayed and slowed this decline.
