Palaeolithic Children Come of Age

ABSTRACT

Comprising at least half of the population of prehistoric societies, children were ubiquitous on Palaeolithic sites. Despite an extensive record of their lifeways, studying children in the deep past presents archaeologists with unique challenges including differential preservation, the use of children as holotypes, interpretive bias, choice of model for the pace of growth and development, difficulties of defining what is means to be human in the Palaeolithic and the necessity of moving between ethological and ethnographic analytical frameworks. This paper reviews both the difficulties and the prospects of studying children in deep time.

KEYWORDS:

• Burials
• footprints
• lithics
• phenomenology
• taphonomy

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Some of these burials are double or multiple burials thus the number of interred individuals is approximately 86 (French and Nowell 2022) but the published number of burials and interred individuals varies among scholars based on criteria used to define an intentional burial.

2 Different ages have been proposed for the Taung child depending whether an ape or human model of growth and development is employed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

April Nowell

Prof. April Nowell is a Paleolithic archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria (Canada). She specialises in cognitive archaeology, Paleolithic art, Neandertal lifeways, the archaeology of children, and the relationship between science, pop culture and the media. She is the author of Growing Up in the Ice Age (2021).