Ten years of Childhood in the Past

David Lancy’s provides a multidisciplinary survey of children as tool makers/users with overall a set of generalisation that might characterise children the makers/users of tools in early hominin societies. His information is derived from lithic archaeology, studies of juvenile chimps as novice tool users, recent laboratory work in human infant and child cognition in relation to the use of objects as tools and the ethnographic study of children learning about the tools used by their communities. He argues that this multidisciplinary approach has the potential to provide greater insights in relation to the development of children as tool makers and users than has previously been available to scholars working within narrow disciplinary constraints.