Children of the Ice Age

The sun rises on the Palaeolithic, 14,000 years ago, and the glacial ice that once blanketed Europe continues its slow retreat. In the daylight, a family begins making its way toward a cave at the foot of a mountain near the Ligurian Sea, in northern Italy. They’re wandering across a steppe covered in short, dry grasses and pine trees. Ahead, the cave’s entrance is surrounded by a kaleidoscope of wildflowers: prickly pink thistles, red-brown mugworts, and purple cornflowers.

But before entering, this hunter-gatherer family stops to collect the small, thin branches of a pine tree. Bundled together, covered with resin and set alight, these branches will become simple torches to illuminate the cave’s darkened galleries. The group is barefoot and the path into the cave is marked by footprints in the soft earth and mud. There are traces of two adults, a male and female, with three children: a three-year-old toddler, a six-year-old child, and an adolescent no older than 11. Canine paw prints nearby suggest they may be accompanied by pets.

Carrying pine torches, they enter the base of the mountain. At around 150 metres inside, the family reaches a long, low corridor. Walking in single file, with only flickering firelight to guide them, they hug the walls as they traverse the uneven ground. The youngest, the toddler, is at the rear. The corridor soon turns to a tunnel as the ground slopes upward, leaving less than 80 cm of space to crawl through. Their knees make imprints on the clay floor. After a few metres, the ceiling reaches its lowest point and the male adult stops. He then pauses, likely evaluating whether the next section is too difficult for the littlest in the group. But he decides to press on, and the family follows, with each member pausing in the same spot before continuing. Further into the cave, they dodge stalagmites and large blocks, navigate a steep slope, and cross a small underground pond, leaving deep footprints in the mud. Finally, they arrive at an opening, a section of the cave that archaeologists from a future geological epoch will call ‘Sala dei Misteri’ (the ‘Chamber of Mysteries’).

While the adults make charcoal handprints on the ceiling, the youngsters dig clay from the floor and smear it on a stalagmite, tracing their fingers in the soft sediment. Each tracing corresponds to the age and height of the child who made it: the tiniest markings, made with a toddler’s fingers, are found closest to the ground.

Eventually, the family accomplished what it had set out to do, or perhaps simply grew bored. Either way, after a short while in the chamber, they made their way out of the cave, and into the light of the last Ice Age.

This family excursion in 12,000 BCE may sound idyllic or even mundane. But, in the context of anthropology and archaeology, small moments like these represent a new and radical way of understanding the past. It wasn’t until 1950, when the cave was rediscovered and named ‘Bàsura’, that the story of this family’s excursion began to be uncovered. Decades later, scientists such as the Italian palaeontologists Marco Avanzini and his team would use laser scanning, photogrammetry, geometric morphometrics (techniques for analysing shape) and a forensic approach to study the cave’s footprints, finger tracings and handprints. These little traces paint a very different prehistorical picture to the one normally associated with life 40,000 to 10,000 years ago, toward the end of the last Ice Age, during a prehistoric period known as the Upper Palaeolithic.

Asked to imagine what life looked like for humans from this era, a 20th-century archaeologist or anthropologist would likely picture the hunting and gathering being done almost exclusively by adults, prompting researchers to write journal articles with titles such as ‘Why Don’t Anthropologists Like Children?’ (2002) and ‘Where Have All the Children Gone?’ (2001). We forget that the adults of the Palaeolithic were also mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles and grandparents who had to make space for the little ones around them. In fact, children in the deep past may have taken up significantly more space than they do today: in prehistoric societies, children under 15 accounted for around half of the world’s population. Today, they’re around a quarter. Why have children been so silent in the archaeological record? Where are their stories?

As anyone who excavates fossils will tell you, finding evidence of Ice Age children is difficult. It’s not just that their small, fragile bones are hard to locate. To understand why we forget about them in our reconstructions of prehistory, we also need to consider our modern assumptions about children. Why do we imagine them as ‘naive’ figures ‘free of responsibility’? Why do we assume that children couldn’t contribute meaningfully to society? Researchers who make these assumptions about children in the present are less likely to seek evidence that things were different in the past.

But using new techniques, and with different assumptions, the children of the Ice Age are being given a voice. And what they’re saying is surprising: they’re telling us different stories, not only about the roles they played in the past, but also about the evolution of human culture itself. (...)

For 20 years, I have taught a class on the archaeology of children in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria in Canada. I begin every semester by asking my undergraduate students what they think of when they hear the words ‘child’ and ‘childhood’. Invariably, they use words and phrases such as ‘naive’, ‘playful’, ‘joyful’ and ‘free of responsibility’. I am not sure whether these words reflect their actual experiences of being a child (memory is often a tricky thing) or their nostalgia for an imagined childhood, but Western archaeologists often bring these same assumptions with them when they study the archaeological record. If you assume that children can’t or shouldn’t contribute to society in the present – economically, politically or culturally – then you are less likely to look for evidence that they did in the past.

These assumptions are changing. A growing body of ethnographic and archaeological research is revealing the ways these forgotten figures have always contributed to the welfare of their communities and themselves. Herding, fetching water, harvesting vegetables, running market stalls, collecting firewood, tending animals, cleaning and sweeping, serving as musicians, working as soldiers in times of war, and caring for younger siblings are all common examples of tasks taken on by children around the world and across time. These tasks leave their mark in the archaeological record.

Palaeolithic children learning to make stone tools produced hundreds of thousands of stone flakes as they transitioned from novice to expert. These flakes overwhelm the contributions of expert tool-makers in archaeological sites around the world. Archaeologists can recognise the work of a novice because people learning to produce stone tools make similar kinds of mistakes. To make, or ‘knap’, a stone tool, you need a piece of material such as flint or obsidian, known as a ‘core’, and a tool to hit it with, known as a ‘hammerstone’. The goal is to remove flakes from the stone core and produce a shape blade or some other kind of tool. This involves striking the edge of a core with a hammerstone with a glancing blow. But novices, who were often children or adolescents, would sometimes hit too far towards the middle of a core, and each unskilled hit would leave material traces of their futile and increasingly frustrated attempts at flake removal. At other times, evidence shows that they got the angle right but hit too hard (or not hard enough) resulting in a flake that terminates too soon or doesn’t detach from the core.

At a roughly 15,000-year-old site called Solvieux in France, the archaeologist Linda Grimm uncovered evidence of a novice stone-knapper, likely a child or adolescent, working on a tool. Sitting to the side of the site, the novice began hitting a core with the hammerstone. After encountering some difficulty, they brought the core they were working on to a more experienced knapper sitting in the centre of the site near a hearth. We know this because the flint flakes produced by the novice and the expert were found mixed together. After receiving help, the novice continued knapping in this central area until the core was eventually exhausted and discarded. While the tools made by the expert knapper were taken away for some task, those made by the novice were left behind. At other sites, novices sat closer to expert knappers as they practised, presumably so they could ask questions and observe the experts while they worked, or just share stories and songs. 

Of course, not all novices were children. But in the Palaeolithic, when your very survival depended on being able to hunt and butcher an animal, process plants, make cordage, and dig up roots and tubers, making a stone tool was essential. Everyone would have had to learn to knap from a young age and, by the time novices were eight or nine years old, they would have developed most of the cognitive and physical abilities necessary to undertake more complex knapping, increasing in proficiency as they entered adolescence. By making stone tools, children provided not only for themselves but for their younger siblings too, contributing to the success of their entire community. (...)

In hindsight, it seems so obvious that archaeologists should be studying children, particularly from prehistory. If children comprised around half (or more) of prehistoric populations, and if prehistory accounts for 99.83 per cent of humans’ time on Earth, then ignoring the contributions of children means that a large portion of the available data is not being taken into consideration in the reconstruction of past lifeways. While that fact alone would be reason enough to study children, there is another one, perhaps more important. The lives of these young individuals who lived in the Palaeolithic – cave explorers, stone tool-carvers, toy makers – are all part of a much larger story about how prehistoric children learned about the world and how they shared that knowledge. Drawing on data from cognitive science, developmental psychology and ethnographic fieldwork, archaeologists studying children are developing ideas about the evolution of human culture and how learned behaviour allowed our species to spread across the planet.

Becoming full members of a community involves a lot of learning for children, as expert knowledge-holders (usually adults) help them acquire culturally relevant behaviour. But it can be difficult for novices – what psychologists refer to as ‘naive learners’ – to figure out what behaviours and knowledge are most important. As any parent knows, these naive learners are not passive in the process. They increasingly choose what to learn and whom they want to learn from. Initially, children learn through vertical knowledge transmission (parent to child) but, as they grow older, their peers exert greater influence, and thus horizontal learning becomes more important (child to child). By the time children reach adolescence, ‘oblique learning’ predominates, and all adults in the community, not just parents, can transmit knowledge.

The cultural anthropologist Sheina Lew-Levy and her colleagues saw this up close when they studied tool innovation among children and teens in modern foraging societies. ‘Tool innovation’ means using new tools, or old tools in new ways, to solve problems. The team observed that adolescents seek out adults they identify as innovators to learn tasks such as basketry, hide working, and hunting. Furthermore, these adolescents are the main recipients and transmitters of innovations. Those of us of a certain age can remember helping our parents program their first VCRs in the same way that teens now introduce their parents to the latest apps.

by April Nowell, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Tom Björklund