Where innovations flourish: an ethnographic and archaeological overview of hunter–gatherer learning contexts

Lew‐Levy, Sheina; Milks, Annemieke; Lavi, Noa; Pope, Sarah M.; Friesem, David E.

doi:10.1017/ehs.2020.35

Cited by 27 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 246 publications

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“…First, children were demographically significant members of hunter-gatherer groups that consumed resources, made significant economic and social contributions, and influenced the archaeological record (Baxter 2008;Callow 2006;Cooney 2018;Crawford 2009;Hammond and Hammond 1981;Hildebrand 2012;Kamp 2015;Lillehammer 2010;Nowell 2015;Riede et al 2018;Roveland 2000;Schwartzman 2006). Second, studying children's material culture and their use of and interaction with space and place can help us understand the learning, transmission, and innovative features of a given cultural taxonomy, as well as make broader cross-cultural comparisons (Lew-Levy, Milks, et al 2020;Nowell 2015;Riede et al 2018). Third, understanding children's involvement in the formation of the archaeological record can shed light on their social interactions with other children and adults, and thus, a society's social structure (Cooney 2018;Kamp 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hunter-gatherer children in the past: an archaeological review

Milks¹,

Lew‐Levy²,

Lavi³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Theoretical engagement and methodological innovations geared towards identifying the presence and activities of children in archaeological contexts has increased in pace over the last decade. This paper presents a systematic review of the literature pertaining to the archaeology of hunter-gatherer children. The review summarises methods and findings from 72 archaeological publications in a number of research areas that show material culture relating to childhood, including children’s playthings and tools, learning to flintknap, and their involvement in the making of marks, art and footprints. By drawing on diverse evidence from all inhabited continents, we explore the implications of these data for our understanding of the cultural variability and patterning of hunter-gatherer children in the deep past. The paper closes by discussing potential improvements to archaeological and anthropological methodologies which would progress our understanding of children as active and engaged members of their societies.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hunter-gatherer children in the past: an archaeological review

Milks¹,

Lew‐Levy²,

Lavi³

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

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show abstract

“…We encourage cross-cultural research to complement ethnographic studies with explicitly experimental CCE research in diverse populations, using ethical and equitable approaches (Broesch et al, 2020; Urassa et al, 2021). Additionally, we simultaneously encourage cross-cultural researchers to validate experimental tasks and paradigms to improve construct validity and thus the quality of explanations (Broesch et al, 2020; Hruschka et al, 2018; Kline et al, 2018; Lew-Levy et al, 2020). These steps will be essential for improving our understanding of how cultural diversity shapes the remarkable diversity of human CCE and how CCE evolved in humans and other species.…”

Section: Evaluation Of the Methods And Advancementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leveling the playing field in studying cumulative cultural evolution: Conceptual and methodological advances in nonhuman animal research.

Rawlings¹,

Legare²,

Brosnan³

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cogniti

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Cumulative cultural evolution (CCE), the improvement of cultural traits over generations via social transmission, is widely believed to be unique to humans. The capacity to build upon others’ knowledge, technologies, and skills has produced the most diverse and sophisticated technological repertoire in the animal kingdom. Yet, inconsistency in both the definitions and criteria used to determine CCE and the methodology used to examine it across studies may be hindering our ability to determine which aspects are unique to humans. Issues regarding how improvement is defined and measured and whether some criteria are empirically testable are of increasing concern to the field. In this article, we critically assess the progress made in the field and current points of debate from conceptual and methodological perspectives. We discuss how inconsistency in definitions is detrimental to our ability to document potential evidence of CCE to nonhuman animals. We build on Mesoudi and Thornton’s (2018) recently described core and extended CCE criteria to make specific recommendations about, from a comparative lens, which criteria should be used as evidence of CCE. We evaluate existing data from both wild and captive studies of nonhuman animals using these suggestions. We finish by discussing issues currently faced by researchers studying CCE in nonhuman animals, particularly nonhuman primates, and provide suggestions that may overcome these concerns and move the field forward.

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“…We do not have to look far for motivating cases. In their contribution to a special issue on the archaeology of children and childcare, Lew-Levy et al (2020) argue that the results of developmental psychology experiments researching the innovation of children in WEIRD societies-results which suggest that children are poor innovators (e.g. Lister et al 2020)-are not generalisable to children of small-scale, forager societies.…”

Section: Preludementioning

confidence: 99%

How WEIRD is Cognitive Archaeology? Engaging with the Challenge of Cultural Variation and Sample Diversity

Killin

Pain

2022

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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In their landmark 2010 paper, “The weirdest people in the world?”, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan outlined a serious methodological problem for the psychological and behavioural sciences. Most of the studies produced in the field use people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, yet inferences are often drawn to the species as a whole. In drawing such inferences, researchers implicitly assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that WEIRD populations are generally representative of the species. Yet neither of these assumptions is justified. In many psychological and behavioural domains, cultural variation begets cognitive variation, and WEIRD samples are recurrently shown to be outliers. In the years since the article was published, attention has focused on the implications this has for research on extant human populations. Here we extend those implications to the study of ancient H. sapiens, their hominin forebears, and cousin lineages. We assess a range of characteristic arguments and key studies in the cognitive archaeology literature, identifying issues stemming from the problem of sample diversity. We then look at how worrying the problem is, and consider some conditions under which inferences to ancient populations via cognitive models might be provisionally justified.

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Where innovations flourish: an ethnographic and archaeological overview of hunter–gatherer learning contexts

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 27 publications

References 246 publications

Hunter-gatherer children in the past: an archaeological review

Hunter-gatherer children in the past: an archaeological review

Leveling the playing field in studying cumulative cultural evolution: Conceptual and methodological advances in nonhuman animal research.

How WEIRD is Cognitive Archaeology? Engaging with the Challenge of Cultural Variation and Sample Diversity

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