An archaeological reconstruction of Saqqaq bows, darts, harpoons, and lances

Grønnow, Bjarne

doi:10.7202/1015952ar

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 7 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These later peoples are the direct cultural and biological ancestors of living Inuit peoples today (Raghavan et al, 2014). Over time, Arctic technologies were refined to include sophisticated weaponry (Grønnow, 1994(Grønnow, , 2012, instruments, facilities, sledges and different kinds of watercraft. The two cultures practised broadly similar subsistence economies and experienced similar environmental conditions.…”

Section: Domain-specific Innovation Through Play Object Priming In Armentioning

confidence: 99%

Children and innovation: play, play objects and object play in cultural evolution

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cultural evolutionary theory conceptualises culture as an information-transmission system whose dynamics take on evolutionary properties. Within this framework, however, innovation has been likened to random mutations, reducing its occurrence to chance or fortuitous transmission error. In introducing the special collection on children and innovation, we here place object play and play objectsespecially functional miniaturesfrom carefully chosen archaeological contexts in a niche construction perspective. Given that play, including object play, is ubiquitous in human societies, we suggest that plaything construction, provisioning and use have, over evolutionary timescales, paid substantial selective dividends via ontogenetic niche modification. Combining findings from cognitive science, ethology and ethnography with insights into hominin early developmental life-history, we show how play objects and object play probably had decisive roles in the emergence of innovative capabilities. Importantly, we argue that closer attention to play objects can go some way towards addressing changes in innovation rates that occurred throughout human biocultural evolution and why innovations are observable within certain technological domains but not others.

show abstract

Section: Domain-specific Innovation Through Play Object Priming In Armentioning

confidence: 99%