Children and innovation: play, play objects and object play in cultural evolution.
Playthings
cultural evolution
human evolution
niche construction
pedagogy
Journal
Evolutionary human sciences
ISSN: 2513-843X
Titre abrégé: Evol Hum Sci
Pays: England
ID NLM: 101773423
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
2021
2021
Historique:
medline:
5
2
2021
pubmed:
5
2
2021
entrez:
17
8
2023
Statut:
epublish
Résumé
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.
Identifiants
pubmed: 37588535
doi: 10.1017/ehs.2021.7
pii: S2513843X21000074
pmc: PMC10427281
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Review
Langues
eng
Pagination
e11Informations de copyright
© The Author(s) 2021.
Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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