Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Childhood Technical Skill Development

Emory University, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

Although children existed and contributed to prehistory, much of the research on human evolution still focuses on adult behavior. Children’s cognitive and physical abilities differ from those of adults, and therefore, researchers can expect to find variation in how individuals at different phases of development engage in evolutionarily important tasks such as stone toolmaking. Stone toolmaking is widely hypothesized to have played a role in human cognitive evolution, with ties to higher order brain functions such as planning, executive control, working memory, and language. Experimental archaeological methods are particularly well-positioned to investigate questions of age-related differences in learning stone toolmaking because it allows researchers to recruit living subjects, as opposed to analyzing archaeological remains, and examine how participants of different ages engage in a stone toolmaking task. Here, the focus is not just on the tools, themselves, but also on participants’ behavior in making the tools and what sort of processes and conditions contribute to effective learning of the skill. This dual perspective promotes insight into the behavioral context surrounding stone toolmaking and can inform future research on the evolution of behaviors, such as teaching, that are fundamental to the human experience. This doctoral dissertation project investigates developmental differences in stone knapping (shaping) skill acquisition between adult and child subjects. Using experimental archaeological methods, 45 adult and 45 child participants will be trained in an Oldowan-style, "least effort" flake production task and compared using metrics of flaking success and individual differences in cognitive ability, physical strength, and personality characteristics. Individual differences data will also be used to investigate within group variation in behavioral correlates of successful skill acquisition for both adult and child participants. Addressing an understudied area of research on human origins, results of this project will have implications for the evolution of the human capacity for cumulative culture and may serve as a reference point for existing archaeological assemblages that show evidence of skill differentials between lithic artifacts. Additionally, this project will serve as a form of science education outreach as part of its design is as an archaeology-themed summer day camp for the children participating in the study. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.