Work-themed play among young children in foraging and farming communities in Central Africa

Fouts, Hillary N.; Neitzel, Carin; Bader, Lauren R.

doi:10.1163/1568539x-00003362

Cited by 15 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…M. Endicott and Endicott (2008), Lye (1997), and Vanstone (1965) said that only around the age of 10 do the activities of Batek and Chippewayan boys and girls diverge. For example, Fouts, Bader, and Neitzel (2016) did not find difference in the amount of work-themed play performed by Aka and Bofi boys and girls in early childhood. In middle childhood, both Morelli (1997) studying the Efe and Boyette (2016a) studying the Aka found that boys and girls tend to participate equally in work-themed play or actual chores, while among neighboring farmers, girls were more likely to participate in work than boys.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 78%

How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Social and Gender Norms? A Meta-Ethnographic Review

Lew‐Levy

Lavi

Reckin

et al. 2017

Cross-Cultural Research

106

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Forager societies tend to value egalitarianism, cooperative autonomy, and sharing. Furthermore, foragers exhibit a strong gendered division of labor. However, few studies have employed a cross-cultural approach to understand how forager children learn social and gender norms. To address this gap, we perform a meta-ethnography, which allows for the systematic extraction, synthesis, and comparison of quantitative and qualitative publications. In all, 77 publications met our inclusion criteria. These suggest that sharing is actively taught in infancy. In early childhood, children transition to the playgroup, signifying their increased autonomy. Cooperative behaviors are learned through play. At the end of middle childhood, children self-segregate into same-sex groups and begin to perform gender-specific tasks. We find evidence that foragers actively teach children social norms, and that, with sedentarization, teaching, through direct instruction and task assignment, replaces imitation in learning gendered behaviors. We also find evidence

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 78%

How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Social and Gender Norms? A Meta-Ethnographic Review

Lew‐Levy

Lavi

Reckin

et al. 2017

Cross-Cultural Research

106

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Boyette ( 2013 , 2016 ) and Gallois et al ( 2015 ) found that, as children grow older, they play less and work more, suggesting that play helps them learn subsistence behaviors. In comparing Aka and Bofi foragers with Bofi farmers, Fouts et al ( 2016 ) found that, though Bofi farmer children between the ages of one and four participated in more work-themed play than their foraging counterparts, forager children were in closer proximity to adults and were more likely to use objects when performing work-themed play. Parental beliefs may contribute to cultural beliefs with regard to play; Neuwelt-Truntzer ( 1981 ) argued that Aka parents believe that if children do not play, they will fail to learn.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition, participating in adult activities alongside either adults or other children, such as gathering water or firewood, allows a child to develop the necessary competencies to complete these tasks independently (Gaskins 2000 ; Lancy 2012 ; Rogoff et al 2003 ). Finally, in small-scale societies where adult activities are not segregated from those of children, children have ample opportunities to observe adults and to imitate their behaviors (Fouts et al 2016 ; Gaskins and Paradise 2009 ; Odden and Rochat 2004 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Subsistence Skills?

Lew‐Levy

Reckin

Lavi

et al. 2017

Hum Nat

169

151

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Hunting and gathering is, evolutionarily, the defining subsistence strategy of our species. Studying how children learn foraging skills can, therefore, provide us with key data to test theories about the evolution of human life history, cognition, and social behavior. Modern foragers, with their vast cultural and environmental diversity, have mostly been studied individually. However, cross-cultural studies allow us to extrapolate forager-wide trends in how, when, and from whom hunter-gatherer children learn their subsistence skills. We perform a meta-ethnography, which allows us to systematically extract, summarize, and compare both quantitative and qualitative literature. We found 58 publications focusing on learning subsistence skills. Learning begins early in infancy, when parents take children on foraging expeditions and give them toy versions of tools. In early and middle childhood, children transition into the multi-age playgroup, where they learn skills through play, observation, and participation. By the end of middle childhood, most children are proficient food collectors. However, it is not until adolescence that adults (not necessarily parents) begin directly teaching children complex skills such as hunting and complex tool manufacture. Adolescents seek to learn innovations from adults, but they themselves do not innovate. These findings support predictive models that find social learning should occur before individual learning. Furthermore, these results show that teaching does indeed exist in hunter-gatherer societies. And, finally, though children are competent foragers by late childhood, learning to extract more complex resources, such as hunting large game, takes a lifetime.

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“…Juveniles learn about animal behaviour and biology well before they start hunting, gaining vicarious experience from hundreds of hours of stories heard around the campfire (low-cost, one-to-many teaching by elders). Child pretend play often mimics adult subsistence tasks, especially when actually performing those tasks would be dangerous or risk resource loss [46,47]. Such play behaviour often transitions into increasing participation in the actual work activity.…”

Section: (B) Human Hunting and Teacher Costsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The optimal timing of teaching and learning across the life course

Gurven

Davison

Kraft

2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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The evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton (Hamilton 1966 J. Theor. Biol. 12 , 12–45. ( doi:10.1016/0022-5193(66)90184-6 )) famously showed that the force of natural selection declines with age, and reaches zero by the age of reproductive cessation. However, in social species, the transfer of fitness-enhancing resources by postreproductive adults increases the value of survival to late ages. While most research has focused on intergenerational food transfers in social animals, here we consider the potential fitness benefits of information transfer, and investigate the ecological contexts where pedagogy is likely to occur. Although the evolution of teaching is an important topic in behavioural biology and in studies of human cultural evolution, few formal models of teaching exist. Here, we present a modelling framework for predicting the timing of both information transfer and learning across the life course, and find that under a broad range of conditions, optimal patterns of information transfer in a skills-intensive ecology often involve postreproductive aged teachers. We explore several implications among human subsistence populations, evaluating the cost of hunting pedagogy and the relationship between activity skill complexity and the timing of pedagogy for several subsistence activities. Long lifespan and extended juvenility that characterize the human life history likely evolved in the context of a skills-intensive ecological niche with multi-stage pedagogy and multigenerational cooperation. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’.

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Work-themed play among young children in foraging and farming communities in Central Africa

Cited by 15 publications

References 26 publications

How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Social and Gender Norms? A Meta-Ethnographic Review

How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Social and Gender Norms? A Meta-Ethnographic Review

How Do Hunter-Gatherer Children Learn Subsistence Skills?

The optimal timing of teaching and learning across the life course

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