Veiled agency? Children, innovation and the archaeological record

Archaeological evidence for thinking about possibilities in hominin evolution

The emergence of the ability to think about future possibilities must have played an influential role in human evolution, driving a range of foresightful behaviours, including preparation, communication and technological innovation. Here we review the archeological evidence for such behavioural indicators of foresight. We find the earliest signs of hominins retaining tools and transporting materials for repeated future use emerging from around 1.8 Ma. From about 0.5 Ma onwards, there are indications of technical and social changes reflecting advances in foresight. And in a third period, starting from around 140 000 years ago, hominins appear to have increasingly relied on material culture to shape the future and to exchange their ideas about possibilities. Visible signs of storytelling, even about entirely fictional scenarios, appear over the last 50 000 years. Although the current evidence suggests that there were distinct transitions in the evolution of our capacity to think about the future, we warn that issues of taphonomy and archaeological sampling are likely to skew our picture of human cognitive evolution. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

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

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.