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ABSTRACT
The overall goal of this paper is to derive a set of generalizations that might characterize children as tool makers/users in the earliest human societies. These generalizations will be sought from the collective wisdom of four distinct bodies of scholarship: lithic archaeology; juvenile chimps as novice tool users; recent laboratory work in human infant and child cognition, focused on objects becoming tools and; the ethnographic study of children learning their community’s tool-kit. The presumption is that this collective wisdom will yield greater insight into children’s development as tool producers and users than has been available to scholars operating within narrower disciplinary limits.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jennifer Deliskave for the assistance with editing and to Siân Halcrow, Alyssa Crittenden and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful feedback on earlier drafts of the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributors
David Lancy has undertaken fieldwork with children as the focus: for extended periods in Liberia, Papua New Guinea and the US; and for shorter periods in Trinidad and Madagascar, among others. In 2008 (revised edition 2015), Cambridge University Press published his The Anthropology of Childhood, a broad survey of contributions to the study of childhood from across the discipline of anthropology. He has published research articles on topics ranging from the study of infant attachment and delayed personhood, the chore curriculum, children as a reserve labour force, how children acquire their culture, socio-historical analyses of teaching and schooling, and the culture of street kids.