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

Abstract

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.

Children’s Evolved Learning Abilities and Their Implications for Education

“…For example, in a meta-ethnographic review of studies examining how hunter-gatherer children acquire subsistence skills, Lew-Levy and her colleagues (2017) reported that it is not until adolescence before adults begin to directly teach children complex skills such as tool manufacture and hunting. Adults in traditional and hunter-gatherer societies do, however, engage in what could be described as indirect teaching of children, as reflected by storytelling around evening fires or providing children with toy tools to use in their play, which contribute to children's acquisition of important skills and knowledge (e.g., Lew-Levy et al, 2017;Nowell, 2021;Riede et al, 2018Riede et al, , 2021. Regardless if we focus on teaching or imitation, children develop remarkable social-learning abilities over the preschool years, with social learning being the principal mechanism responsible for Homo sapiens' expansive material and intellectual culture (Legare, 2019;Tomasello, 2019).…”

Robert C. Dunnell's Systematics in prehistory at 50

“…At the same time, however, the topic remains poorly heeded in archaeological pedagogy (Lyman, 2021). Given that cultural evolutionary theory itself teaches us that aspects of culture most easily and rapidly change when scaffolded through active teaching (Riede et al, 2021), we recommend that, after half a century, Dunnell's Systematics in prehistory – and with it rigorous and replicable ways of classifying material culture – are placed more abundantly on our curricula, in addition to continuing the ongoing critique and transformation of existing classifications through novel research. Only when the construction and meaning of our analytical units and their relationships among one another are transparent and robust cultural taxonomies are in place can we seriously hope to understand the patterns and processes that have shaped cultural evolution in deep history.…”

Innovations in professional activity: what students of specialty “Preschool Education” think about it

“…It is especially important to start applying innovations in the educational process of preschool education, as the modernization of the preschool education system, its current development requires effective methodological management of the process of implementation of pedagogical innovations in practice to improve the quality of educational services [11,17]. The educational process in PEI should be carried out according to the formula: "implementation of innovations = correspondence to the requirements of the time and social demands + vector of progress in the implementation of educational aims".…”