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

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Riede, Felix
Walsh, Matthew J
Nowell, April
Langley, Michelle C
Johannsen, Niels N
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2021
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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 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.

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Evolutionary Human Sciences

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3

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© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Evolutionary Human Sciences. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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History, heritage and archaeology

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Riede, F; Walsh, MJ; Nowell, A; Langley, MC; Johannsen, NN, Children and innovation: play, play objects and object play in cultural evolution, Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2021, 3, pp. e11

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