TY - JOUR
T1 - Children and innovation
T2 - play, play objects and object play in cultural evolution
AU - Riede, Felix
AU - Walsh, Matthew J.
AU - Nowell, April
AU - Langley, Michelle C.
AU - Johannsen, Niels N.
N1 - Edition: 2021/02/05 Publisher: Cambridge University Press
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - 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 objects - especially functional miniatures - from 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.
AB - 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 objects - especially functional miniatures - from 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.
KW - Playthings
KW - cultural evolution
KW - human evolution
KW - niche construction
KW - pedagogy
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85129475566&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/ehs.2021.7
DO - 10.1017/ehs.2021.7
M3 - Journal article
VL - 3
JO - Evolutionary Human Sciences
JF - Evolutionary Human Sciences
M1 - e11
ER -