Afarensis

I have a confession to make. Right at the moment, I am playing the role of ScienceBlogger. You are also playing a role - that of a reader. I also play other roles. For example, I play the role of husband, father, pet owner, etc. Each of these roles has a set of behaviors associated with them. As a ScienceBlogger I am expected to actually talk about science in certain ways, say on a blog, using my own words and not plagiarizing, etc. When I was a child I had the role of "helper". I would help my dad change the furnace filter or change a tire and as I got older the type of help I was expected to provide got larger and more complex. Before I could help my dad change the furnace filter I had to actually learn how to do whatever he wanted me to learn. Basically, cultural knowledge was being transmitted. Just as cultural knowledge is being transmitted when I am in the role of ScienceBlogger. The method of transmission may be different, but the process is more or less the same. Modern Homo sapiensaround the world have a rich and varied cultural repertoire and have found a wide variety of ways to pass that information along. part of the anthropological mission is to understand how this happens. Another part of the mission is to understand how this evolved.

Take the Dikika child for example. Shortly after the find was announced an article about it appeared in National Geographic. The article made several interesting points about the three year old. One being that if the Dikika child shows the absence of an opposable big toe then it did not cling to it's mother the way modern primates do. This has certain implications for the way australopithecine society was organized. A second aspect concerned the expansion of the brain in Australopithecus afarensis and it's implications for an extended period of childhood dependence. This, too, has implications for the way australopithecine families were organized - the roles and behaviors. It also, ultimately has implications for the evolution of cultural and the transmission of cultural knowledge mentioned above. Although australopithecine culture was undoubtedly richer than that of, say, chimps, we can still learn something just by examining their bones. Not so for later hominids, such as in the Lower and Middle Paleolithic.

Which brings me to the point of this post. John Shea has an interesting article in the November/December issue of Evolutionary Anthropology (Child's Play: Reflections on the Invisibility of Children in the Paleolithic Record [Volume 15:212-216]). Shea makes some of the same points I have tried to make:

Because stone tools are the most durable residues of hominin behavior, archaeological lithic analysis is uniquely situated to shed light on change and variation in the social transmission of technical knowledge[emphasis mine - afarensis].

A little latter he says:

If we can develop ways to identify and assess children's impact on paleolithic assemblages, we may be able to track change and variability in child-rearing, an activity that must stand at the center of any evolutionary model of human origins. [emphasis mine - afarensis]

The non-bolded parts of the above two quotes form the subject matter for the rest of this post. Shea mentions a few studies of Aurignacian and Magdalenian sites where the investigators were able to separate the lithics into good and poor knappers - in other words they were able to identify competence related variation in their samples. Flintknapping is not something you can learn by reading or going out and banging two rocks together. It requires instruction in some form (i.e. enculturation) and practice. Shea points to several studies of children in hunter-gatherer and preindustrial agrarian societies that indicate children start imitating adult subsistence behavior around 7-11 years of age. He also cites one study that indicates that children of that age are strong enough and have the necessary cognitive skills to produce flaked stone tools. Given that flintknapping is learned by instruction, observation and imitation, what, Shea asks, would this look like in the archaeological record?

Preliminarily, Shea argues that novice knappers produce more waste flakes per given tool type (in his classes novices produce roughly twice as much by weight as he does). He also argues that assemblages created by novice knappers should be more variable by tool type. With that in mind, what should tools made by children look like? First, they should be small enough to fit the makers hands. A number of cultures around the world adopted microlithic tools for reasons of material scarcity and mobility and Shea is quick to exclude "adaptive microlithicization". The tools should be made of expediently procured or widely available local resources (except, obviously, in societies with elites who might let their children use rare or high quality materials as a sign of status). Finally, Shea argues that children might:

...disperse artifacts from deposits created by adults and gather into juxtaposition artifacts made by adults for seemingly disparate purposes.

Obviously, he has more to say about each of these criteria - he has some interesting things to say about small unretouched flakes (which make up significant portions of most Paleolithic assemblages). The problem is that we do not have a large body of mid-range theory to help sort some of this out. To that end Shea makes a couple of suggestions. One of which would make a great thesis for some aspiring MA or Ph. D. candidate. He suggests collecting lithic byproducts of people learning to flintknap in college classes, workshops, etc, and monitor the change over time of things like conservation of striking platform, optimization of cutting edge and length of fracture propagation. Clearly, data would need to be collected over a longer period than a semester or two.

This is one of the few articles I am aware of that explores the problem of identifying the activity of children in the archaeological record. I'm sure there are more out there (but I could be wrong) so if my readers know of any others feel free to let me know. I would also be interested in what the archaeologists among my readers think? How would you approach the issue?