Why it's important to learn how children lived in the last ice age

*Originally published on March 6, 2022.

The children who lived more than 10,000 years ago have been historically understudied even though they're pivotal for our collective understanding of the species, according to researcher April Nowell.

"If children represented anywhere between a half to two-thirds of the population during the paleolithic, then in order to understand the lives of our ancestors, we need to also understand the lives of these children," Nowell, a paleolithic archeologist at the University of Victoria told CBC Radio's IDEAS.

Nowell, author of Growing Up in the Ice Age, has spent decades piecing together the past with only hints of evidence left by people just minding their own business at the tail end of the last ice age around 15,000 years ago, when wooly mammoths roamed the countryside.

She's one of a growing number of researchers working to change longstanding biases that have led to children being understudied compared to their adult counterparts.

"When we imagine the landscapes that were peopled by our ancestors, we imagine adults who hunted and gathered, who fished, who made stone tools and created art. But of course, these adults were also parents," she said.

"They were grandparents and aunts and uncles, and they had to make space physically, emotionally, intellectually and cognitively for the children around them."

Children were often disregarded in archeological studies, she said, based in part on the belief that their "random" or "unpredictable" behaviour distorted archeological records.

"[They argued] children aren't really the main cultural actors at any point in human history — based on nothing, I will add. And so why would we even take the time to study them?" according to Jane Baxter, associate professor and chair of archeology at DePaul University in Chicago.

More recently, however, "this field has exploded as an area of interest," Baxter said, noting her 2005 book The Archaeology of Childhood cited about 30 sources. The second edition, out this summer, includes hundreds of sources.

'Ice age influencers'

According to Nowell and other researchers in related fields, what we learn about children from the ice age can carry lessons about how kids learn and develop today, as well.

Sheina Lew-Levy, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, studies modern hunter-gatherer societies, such as the BaYaka foragers in the Republic of the Congo.

In some of those societies, children largely taught each other important life skills such as hunting and gathering, instead of receiving direct adult instruction.

Those observations influenced how Lew-Levy raises and teaches her own children. "I feel much more relaxed to let my child pursue their own interests. And I trust that, you know, they are kind of evolutionarily wired to learn," she said.

"I can just be a parent, instead of a teacher."

Nowell's studies also look at cumulative culture: the process of adults passing down knowledge to their children, and then so on through successive generations.

Youths weren't simply an empty repository: they remembered some lessons, forgot others, and chose which lessons to build on throughout their lives to pass to their own children.

"We can think about it in the same way that some of us may remember helping our parents program their first VCRs. And today, if I want to use the Xbox controller to upload Netflix onto my smart TV, I'm calling one of my teens," she explained.

"Through social learning, paleolithic children were the ultimate consumers, producers, transmitters and drivers of human cumulative culture.

"I often like to refer to these teens as the consummate ice age influencers."

Lew-Levy says these lessons are a reminder that most societies throughout history developed in ways far different from the Western lens of modern education and family dynamics.

"If we truly want to understand child development as it happens … we have to diversify the communities that we study," she said.

Lew-Levy, who is originally from Montreal, says that Canadians don't have to look very far to see the dangers of ignoring this lesson.

"We have a history of residential schools and forced Western schooling of Indigenous communities that have led to incredibly traumatic cultural experiences … and cultural genocide for these communities," she said.

"Even though schooling can be empowering, it can also be disempowering to communities and actually erase some of children's agency in how and what they want to learn."

Intimate moments

Another reason little was known about paleolithic children was a lack of data and evidence. Because of their size relative to adults, few fossil and burial records have survived.

"All things being equal, larger, denser bones are preserved longer and in better condition," Nowell explained.

As interest grew and archeological tools advanced, the body of artifacts and evidence has grown.

Some of that includes footprints and handprints. One such series of prints, taken from a 14,000-year-old cave in Italy, appears to document a walking trip taken by a family including two adults, a teenager, two preteen children and a smaller creature — possibly their pet dog.

"I'll be the first to admit that this is not the most dramatic story," Nowell said. "But I think that's the point…. It gives us this window, this little intimate moment, this snapshot into the everyday lives of these people."

Another artifact, found in Laugerie-Basse, France, appears to be an optical toy (or "thaumatrope") comprised a series of drawings that show a doe running, much like a modern flip book.

The archeological record for toys is spotty, Nowell said. But other objects have been found, such as small throwing axes, whistles and figurines, which may be used for recreation, as well as skills training or unknown rituals.

Nowell says researchers have uncovered "a tremendous amount of beads associated with children" fashioned from shells or mammoth ivory and noticeably smaller in size than beads worn by adults.

Some beads found at a children's burial site in La Madeleine, France may have been embroidered onto the outfits fashioned specifically for the burial, or they may have been made for them to wear in life before an untimely demise.

Making those beads likely took "hours and hours of work," Nowell said.

"What really speaks to how much these children were loved is that these beads were buried with that child. They weren't passed onto another child."

Written by Jonathan Ore. Produced by Matthew Lazin-Ryder.