Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Curse Tablets, Ice Skates and the Archaeology of Childhood - Ep 258
3.1k Plays9 months ago
This week we have 3 interesting archaeology news stories. First up, “curse tablets” were found at a Roman villa in the UK. Then, a 1,000 year old bone ice skate was found at a site in the Czech Republic. And finally, we have a discussion about the length of childhood in humans, and how it evolved to be that way and the somewhat overlooked archaeology of childhood.
Links
- Mysterious ‘curse tablets’ and ‘sophisticated’ paintings found at ancient Roman site
- Archaeologists Unearth 1,000-Year-Old Ice Skate Made of Animal Bone in Czech Republic
- Grow Slow: Human childhood is uniquely protracted. How did it evolve to be that way and why? - New Scientist Feature
Contact
- Chris Webster
chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com - Rachel Roden
rachel@unraveleddesigns.com
RachelUnraveled (Instagram)
ArchPodNet
- APN Website: https://www.archpodnet.com
- APN on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/archpodnet
- APN on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/archpodnet
- APN on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archpodnet
- Tee Public Store: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/archaeology-podcast-network?ref_id=5724
Affiliates
- Motion: https://www.archpodnet.com/motion
- Liquid I.V.
Ready to shop better hydration, use my special link https://zen.ai/thearchaeologyshow1 to save 20% off anything you order.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Archaeology Show
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to the Archaeology Show. TAS goes behind the headlines to bring you the real stories about archaeology and the history around us. Welcome to the podcast.
Episode 258 Topics Overview
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to the Archaeology Show, episode 258. On today's show, we talk about Roman curse tablets, ancient ice skates, and why kids won't just grow up already. Let's dig a little deeper, because you know one of those little bastards buried in the backyard.
00:00:35
Speaker
Welcome to the show, everyone. Hi. You could ask me how it's going. I mean, you know the answer, but it's fun. I'm very self-conscious. I know you are. I think I did that to you. I'm sorry.
00:00:47
Speaker
I'll say it's going pretty well. We just had a little bit of a cheese and cracker snack. We've got some wine. We're looking out over a valley south of Reno, Nevada at storms and snowy capped mountains. Yeah, it's kind of beautiful down here. You're lucky enough to have the Sierra view. I've got the non-Sierra view. Yeah, what is it? The Virginia Highlands or whatever? Virginia range. Virginia range, yeah. Still gorgeous though, and it's getting dark as we speak. Yes. But yeah, lovely, lovely part of the country down here for sure.
Mysterious Roman Curse Tablets Discovery
00:01:15
Speaker
You know it's also dark. Cursed tablets.
00:01:17
Speaker
Right. Yes. Maybe. As we'll find out, possibly. Indeed. Yeah. All right. So this first article is from the Merced Sun Star, and it says, mysterious curse tablets and sophisticated paintings found at ancient Roman site. So this is a CRM project in England. It's the future site of a housing development being excavated by Red River Archaeology Group. The site is in Grove, a village in Oxfordshire, England, which is about 70 miles west of London.
00:01:47
Speaker
Okay. So archeologist Francesca Girelli. Francesca? What did I say? Francesca? Oh, that's wrong. Francesca Girelli. I don't know. Suspected rich deposits because, you know, she's digging in England near London. Right. Yeah. She said that as soon as they hit the first wall, they knew they had a Roman Villa. I'm like, did they have bets as archeologists? Like, when are we going to hit the Villa? Yeah.
00:02:12
Speaker
And you probably had to go through all kinds of other stuff to get there too. Just knocking away the Renaissance stuff, the medieval stuff, Dark Ages. Just get it out of the way. We gotta get to the Roman stuff. That's all boring. Turns out it was an 1800 year old Roman villa. So that's pretty cool. It had three main buildings dating between 50 CE and 200 CE. And it fell out of use between 350 CE and 450 CE.
00:02:36
Speaker
I know they said 1800 years old and then they have the oldest dated 50 CE, which is 19 hundred and 75 years old. Probably like the main occupation is about 1800 years ago, roughly. Sounds like it. Yeah. The project manager, Louis Stafford says that the size of the buildings and richest of goods suggest the Villa complex was a dominant feature in the area. They said might even like the whole region. Yeah. This is just a big place where people came to do things. That makes sense.
00:03:03
Speaker
And they found a collection of tightly coiled lead scrolls and these are commonly known as curse tablets. And I've never heard of this before. So interesting. And apparently people would like write these curses towards people, their, their wishes and curses towards people and they would roll it back up and then it would be tossed into an offering pit basically.
00:03:26
Speaker
So it's pieces of lead, so how are they writing on it? Are they carving into it? Yeah, lead's really soft. You can use any pointy thing to do it. You can use a fingernail probably. Yeah, I guess that's how they're able to roll and unroll them into the scroll shape. Yeah. Apparently these are common and found near cultural centers, such as temples and things like that. But the archaeologists here are puzzled about this because it doesn't look like this is a cultural center yet. So they're trying to figure out what's going on with these scrolls.
00:03:50
Speaker
Yeah, weird. Cause it's a villa. So like, I mean, a villa complex. So I guess maybe it could have been sort of a cultural center for people if it was, you know, some kind of really important structure in this area at that time. Well, I was wondering kind of two things before I read on and one of them was, well, maybe, you know, the villagers here can't get to the cultural center, wherever that's at. So somebody's collecting them and we'll deliver these to cultural center.
00:04:17
Speaker
Yeah, maybe to be buried as an offering. Yeah. Or maybe they were just ready to be written on, which is what I read next. They, uh, they found about 20 of these. Yeah. The team unrolled six of them and all six were blank. Yeah. So what are these just blanks that were delivered and said here, you need to have a curse tablet ready for your curses.
00:04:36
Speaker
But like, why would they be pre-scrolled? Like, why are you gonna- Pre-rolled? Yes, pre-rolled. Why would you roll them before you've written on them? Like, you know, doesn't that seem weird? Yeah, maybe that's how
Significance of Roman Site Artifacts
00:04:47
Speaker
they were stored. I don't know. Yeah. That is weird. Yeah, I don't really know. And is it possible that the the writings could have rubbed off somehow or be gone? I guess it is possible, although
00:04:58
Speaker
It would make me wonder if that happens frequently with the lead tablet. Like when you roll it up, it tightens up the structure and then like gets rid of the writing. And then over time it just kind of disappears, but they clearly have seen this kind of stuff before. So some of these lead curse tablets must have been intact, you know, many times with the wooden know it.
00:05:15
Speaker
Yeah. And also there's so many different ways that you can like scan things these days to pull images out of it. So even if it had faded or was not there anymore, there, there has to be some kind of imaging that they can run on it and find out. So yeah, the other things they found were some brick flooring. And this was curious and indoor under the floor heating system known as hypo cost.
00:05:38
Speaker
Yeah, I couldn't really find much more about that. Like heated floors. They had heated floors in this Roman villa. Yeah. That sounds about right. Wow. So was it like a running warm water underneath the floor to heat it up? No, I didn't get that, but I'm not really sure what it was. Interesting. They also found an oven structure for drying wheat or oats and fragments of
00:05:59
Speaker
sophisticated paintings on plasters. And those are cool. There's actually a picture in the article here. They said that the colors were very vibrant and wouldn't have looked a whole lot different than when they were new. Yeah. Apparently these things were probably inside a lot of the time. So not really sun exposure and then broken and fragmented were probably buried and protected. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. The colors are very pretty and very vibrant. So you can see that it was definitely like a lot of care was put into doing this. Yeah.
00:06:28
Speaker
They also found a miniature axe, which one of the archaeologists is holding one of the pictures near the end of the article. Yeah, it's tiny. I know. They, of course, said that... What is that, maybe two inches? Something like that. If that inch and a half, maybe. They said that it was likely used as an offering or some sort of thing. Of course, they said ritual, but I'm like, BS, this is a kid's toy. Yeah. Like, what would the point of a ritual
00:06:49
Speaker
with a tiny axe bee, right? Yeah. I mean, one might say, well, if you're burying like a woodsman or something like that, maybe they want to be buried with a representation of an axe, but you see people buried with entire axes. Yeah. Yeah. Why go to the trouble of making a tiny little axe to bury with Mr. Woodchopper, you know? I mean, unless
00:07:09
Speaker
I can't imagine in England this was true, but unless the materials for making an axe were scarce and they didn't want to bury them with their attacks. I doubt that. Yeah, I doubt that either. Yeah, it seems far more likely that it's some kind of toy or maybe, I mean, what is it made of? Because an axe is made of two materials, right? You've got your metal component and you've got your wood component. Or stone component. Or stone, yeah. This looks like it's either ceramic or possibly metal. It could be bronze or something like that, but it's hard to say. Yeah.
00:07:37
Speaker
Yeah, they don't actually say what it is in the description here. I guess it could be for some kind of ritual. You see miniatures of all kinds of things in a ritual setting, right? So this could have accompanied some kind of small figurine. And we just don't have the figurine anymore, but we have the axe. I can see that being possible. Yeah, that's totally possible.
00:07:59
Speaker
All right. They also found pottery fragments, coins, jewelry, and that's all the normal stuff. And then a belt buckle shaped like a horse head. I thought that was kind of neat. It is interesting to find this many sort of, I guess, important artifacts, important individual artifacts at a villa rather than, you know, a ceremonial center or some kind of religious complex or something like that. So it does make you wonder if there's more going on here than just somebody's house, somebody's really big fancy house, but still like maybe there was something more going on there. Who knows?
Ancient Ice Skates and Winter Travel
00:08:29
Speaker
Yep, something tells me these archaeologists were just skating through and not really thinking about anything. Much like our next archaeologist to the next article. Much like you coming up with that transition. He's like, stop paying attention to me five minutes ago. I've been working that one out. Good job. I don't listen to the last three or four minutes of any segment. I know you don't. That's why I always end them. Right. All right. Back in a minute.
00:08:57
Speaker
Welcome back to the archeology show, episode 258. And now we're talking about skates.
00:09:03
Speaker
Yes, we are. This is so cool. You always think of ice skating as being like a modern sort of sport, you know, or, or leisure activity for fun. Right. But this article is from the Smithsonian and it's called archeologists unearth 1000 year old ice skate made of animal bone in Czech Republic. And that is really cool because that is way further back than I would have thought ice skates went. Mm hmm.
00:09:29
Speaker
So researchers from the Comenius Museum found the ice skate during excavations of a basement in the city of Prarov. Just a basement. Yeah, I don't, it didn't specify exactly where they were doing these excavations. And Prarov is approximately 160 miles east of Prague, if that helps place it. The skate is a bone artifact and it is smooth with almost a polished finish to it.
00:09:55
Speaker
Yeah, it was shaped into a hook or nose on one end, kind of like the front of a skate. That's what I would think it would be anyway. And then both ends have a small hole, which is where leather straps would have threaded through to attach the skate to a shoe or a sled, which we'll talk about in a little bit. So that's how it was attached.
00:10:17
Speaker
Zdenk Schenk, an archaeologist from the museum, says that the skate likely dates to the late 10th or early 11th century. And they think this because of pottery fragments that were found nearby. So yet another example of relative dating telling us when something was made, probably. There you go. Did they say you did most of the research on this article? Did they say what kind of bone? They do. It is? OK, we'll get to that.
00:10:42
Speaker
So at the time, this area was a fortress that was very important to King Bolislav the Brave. And he occupied Moravia at that time and had soldiers stationed here. So they're kind of thinking it was sort of related to that occupation potentially, which is interesting because again, you're talking about soldiers, not people who had a lot of time to just like play around. So again, ice skating as a function rather than as a pastime or a sport.
00:11:12
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and that makes total sense because, you know, you mentioned we don't really think of ice skates as being something you would find in the archaeological record. Yeah. You know, because it's more of a, you know, Olympics or something like that. Yeah. But yeah, everything started with more of a practical use, I would say. Yeah. And then was made into a sport or made into something else later on. It's like jogging. People still ran back then. They just did it for their lives.
00:11:41
Speaker
Don't you still fear for your life when you run? I do. I know I do, but... I remember one of the first apps that came out for like a running app for the iPhone was that zombie run. Oh, that's right! Oh, yeah, that was funny. Yeah. So, skates back in this timeframe, like a thousand years ago-ish, would have been essential for getting around in the winter months.
00:12:02
Speaker
And it's not going to be like a smooth skating motion, like, you know, doing triple sock house and stuff like that or whatever the jumps are. Yeah. So it's not that so much. It's more of like this like shuffle across a frozen surface, whether it's lake or even just like just like hard ground that's been frozen over. That's that's really what the purpose of them was.
00:12:25
Speaker
Yeah. And like you mentioned earlier, they could attach these to the bottoms of a sled to carry goods or drag them across a frozen surface. Yeah. Kind of like a multi-use tool almost rather than again, something fun. Maybe it was fun. I don't know, but this was definitely more of a tool. Well, you know, kids made it fun at some point.
00:12:41
Speaker
They probably did. That's probably why people do crazy backflips and stuff on the ice now because of kids. So they were usually made from animal long bones and this one is no exception. It looks like it was made from the radius or forearm of a horse.
00:12:59
Speaker
Yep. And this was probably, I mean, in this area, this could have been one of the only ways people were able to get around in the winter, especially in an area with a lot of water that freezes over. Yeah. You know, it doesn't have to be a frozen lake though. If you're putting it on a sled, it could help it go through, you know, just snow. Yeah. If it's like a frozen crusty snow situation. Sure. Yeah. And like, I mean, this is an area with a lot of water, right? I'm sure there were creeks and rivers and things that would freeze over that they could use to quickly move from one place to another. So.
00:13:29
Speaker
And this is not the only place where we find skates like this. There's nearly identical ones found across all of Northern Europe, including Scandinavia, England, Ireland, all of those kinds of places where there was a lot of cold weather in the winter and places that were frozen over. So it was clearly a method that a lot of different groups of people developed in order to efficiently move across the winter landscape.
00:13:51
Speaker
So I have this quote from the Smithsonian article that I really liked. Schenck was born in Perov. He remembers ice skating with friends on the city's frozen Bekva River clad in leather boots equipped with metal blades. This was dangerous entertainment in quotes that his parents and grandparents also participated in. He tells Smithsonian.
00:14:10
Speaker
So like to know that people are doing this today, essentially a version of this where they just tie on, you know, metal blades onto their leather boots that they use for walking around and that his parents and his grandparents also did it. Like it's sort of this like unbroken chain of, you know, somewhat dangerous activity, but that also served a function back in the day to get around more efficiently and maybe is today more for fun, but still like probably super dangerous. And it was back then too, I'm sure.
00:14:38
Speaker
Yeah, I'm struggling to see how they would actually mount these things onto somebody's shoes without having it like roll over itself or something like that. Now the bold one looks wide enough and shallow enough that it might just like sit on there. But man, metal blades and things like that, like how do you, without hooking them to another thing that you then hook your shoe in, like strap on ice skates, man, just the dangers of that. It seems like
00:15:03
Speaker
there could have been a missing component here, almost like a cage that you construct to go around your shoe. Not the modern version that he's talking about, but the ancient version, like a cage of some sort may be made out of wood or like brush or something that you sort of fold around your boot and then tie this to it. That would maybe be a little bit more supportive. It's possible. Obviously that is not the kind of thing that is going to preserve over time. So we wouldn't have evidence of that.
00:15:31
Speaker
But that's just an idea. I don't know.
Why is Human Childhood Prolonged?
00:15:35
Speaker
Well, well, I just like, I mean, anytime you know, I'm going into like, you know, a segue, I say, well, I'm going to stop doing that.
00:15:47
Speaker
As you mentioned earlier you know it was used for practical uses but I was like you know somebody would have played around with this and it was probably kids yeah and that does tend to lead to people to think about other things when somebody's using something for a use that it wasn't designed for maybe they don't even sure what the use is or they're not equipped to use it for that thing so then just start messing around with it and playing and it turns out
00:16:12
Speaker
The ability to play and kind of invent new things like games and stuff like that is not necessarily uniquely human, but it might actually be somewhat uniquely human and have contributed to how long children stay children. We'll talk about that on the other side of the break.
00:16:30
Speaker
Welcome back to The Archaeology Show, Episode 258. And this article is from New Scientist, and it's not really an article necessarily. They call it a feature in here. Yeah. It's not like new research on a site or a place or a people or something. It's just kind of like, it's almost like an editorial a little bit, like just musings about things, which it was really interesting, so yeah.
00:16:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I thought it was and the title kind of brought me in and it says, grow slow. Human childhood is uniquely protracted. How did it evolve to be that way and why? Wonders, Michael Marshall, the author. So it's kind of funny, the little story he starts out with this article. It's about his 10 year old daughter. I'll just let you guys read that, but check out the link in the show notes for this. Again, it's from New Scientist.
00:17:19
Speaker
I mean, really what this is about is why is the human childhood experience so damn long? Yeah. Right. Why is it so long? If a human lives an average lifespan, a quarter of those years will be spent underage or what we would consider underage. Yeah. Yeah. No other primate spends so much time becoming an adult.
00:17:37
Speaker
No other animal, really, like at all? Proportionally. Proportionally. Yeah. No, no, yeah. Proportionally. Yeah. I know they talk about some that do have longer, but it's proportional to their lifespan. Exactly. No other animal spends a third of their time becoming an adult. Yeah, exactly.
00:17:54
Speaker
And it's pretty clear that over the course of human evolution, childhood has gotten progressively longer. If you start with primates as your example, which we'll talk about in a little bit, the different phases they have, but if you start with primates and then you move to humans, I mean, obviously primates evolved as well, but they weren't too different than they are now seven million years ago when you started having humanity start to break off from that branch.
00:18:18
Speaker
But either way, ours started getting longer, and why? But before we talk about that, we have to define childhood, which I thought was an interesting thing. Yeah, that was interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way, but many societies define the transition between child and adult in different ways, of course. It could be learning certain skills or gaining certain personality traits, certain abilities. It could be biological. There's a lot of different ways to define that transition point.
00:18:45
Speaker
By the way, while you're hearing all this, a lot of what's quoted in this article was written by April Noelle, who we've interviewed on this show before. Oh, have we? Yeah, she was a coauthor on several books. I'm pretty sure we've talked to her before on the show. Yeah. So speaking of biological, you know, ways to define childhood and the transition to adulthood.
00:19:04
Speaker
most of us are sexually mature long before we turn 18. And yet our development doesn't actually finish until we're like almost 25 years old or more. So it's like, how can you define that when you're talking about, well, you've got the social definition of 18, at least in this country, right? You've got biological of 25, but sexual maturity is, you know, anywhere from 13 to 17 or whatever it might be. You know, it's just such a big range and it makes it very difficult to define.
00:19:34
Speaker
Right. And then childhood is also a time of mental development. And it's a time when you're dependent on someone else. And that's one of the definitions that I kind of like is childhood could be defined as a time when you are dependent on someone else, when you gain independence, maybe even not necessarily even living on your own, like we would consider maybe today, although some people wouldn't consider that today because they're still 30 and living at home. But, you know, are you are you an adult in that case? Right.
00:20:01
Speaker
And that's a very Western way of looking at things. You have some families where you never leave your family home and that is like you, you bring your family into that home and when you get married or whatever, you have your kids there. Like you just, the family generation is just growing involved in the same house. So like you can't even look at it that way. It's different everywhere you go.
00:20:21
Speaker
Yeah, when you compare us to other animals, it still gets even weirder because this is a far other end of the spectrum here, but there's a lot of stuff in between. But bowhead whales, which I really can't visualize, you hear about blue whales and gray whales, but bowhead whales, they hit sexual maturity to about 25 years, but can live to over 200 years old.
00:20:42
Speaker
So that's an eighth of their life. Yeah, or less, or less. Yeah. Yeah. And again, the article goes on to say we can live up to about a hundred. So when you look at us, that's a quarter of our time or more as juveniles. And that again, in the nature world is odd. It's just different. Yeah.
00:20:57
Speaker
Now, human childhood is also different in its experience compared to other animals. Other primates go through three stages, and they call them infant, juvenile, and adult. And infant was defined as basically you're just sitting there suckling and being groomed and things like that. Attached to your buttock, essentially. Juveniles get up and go explore on their own a little bit. They play with other juveniles, and they go around. And then you go pretty much straight to adults. Yeah. So that's how primates do it.
00:21:25
Speaker
But humans, however, have five different stages. Infant, kind of the same definition. Child, which is that sort of in-between stage up to like, you know, six or so where you are dependent on an adult and you're not really making your own decisions too much, then you hit juvenile where you are starting to make your own decisions and do your own thing a little bit.
00:21:48
Speaker
adolescent, which would kind of be like your teenage years, right? It's like pre-adult where your little brains can't be trusted yet. And then there's adults. So those are the five stages of human development. Yeah. Technically, they define the child phases lasting from weaning until the eruption of the first permanent molar tooth, which can be anywhere between two and six years old. Yeah.
00:22:10
Speaker
And then adolescents are physically able to reproduce. So you go through puberty basically, but are still maturing in body and mind. So you're not quite an adult yet. You're not really, you know, you're not really quite there. Yeah. And the fact that we define those, even though primates do have those biological stages, but they don't have those like phases of what we will call childhood, which sounds like more of a cultural definition to me in that respect than anything else. Yeah, for sure. And the adolescent and child phase had
00:22:40
Speaker
kind of been considered unique to humans. But there is some recent evidence, however, that chimpanzees might experience this adolescent growth spurt as well, but it's much shorter than what humans experience. So it's not quite the same thing.
00:22:56
Speaker
So, trying to find evidence of these children in the archaeological record and how they evolved and why childhood has gotten so long for humanity is really, really tough. Because the fossil record for children over the last seven million years is spotty at best. There's hardly anything.
00:23:13
Speaker
And we don't even have enough material to really analyze the situation and even have a conversation about it until the Australopithecus came on scene between about four and two million years ago. And in fact, recently a study of eight Australopithecus afarensis remains from over three million years ago found that young ones had smaller brains than modern chimpanzees of the same age and adult brains were a bit larger than chimp adult brains.
00:23:39
Speaker
So this suggests that childhood was already lengthening a little bit over three million years ago. Yeah, which totally makes sense. Yeah Then we get to the 1.6 million year old Turkana boy who was a Homo erectus and was a child We think he was about eight years old when he died and his brain indicates a faster growth rate than modern humans Yeah, so we're getting this longer
00:24:04
Speaker
It's lengthening, but it's still faster. And that's on a completely different trajectory from the Australopithecines that we mentioned. And 1.5 million years from the Australopithecines is a really long time. Really long time. Really long time. I can't even really comprehend how long that is. Yeah. Yeah. And then from, that's like halfway between us and Australopithecines, right? Because it's another one and a half million years to us.
00:24:29
Speaker
And that's why when you look at this difference between them and Homo erectus two million years ago, there's a significant extension in childhood when you look at that. Yeah. Growth patterns also indicate that child and adolescent phases have emerged in Homo erectus. Yeah. Now, Homo sapiens, which would be us, evolved around 300,000 years ago. So yet another big jump forward in time. And we're even more slowed down and elongated in the childhood timeframe.
00:24:57
Speaker
The lengthening could have happened over millions of years, as we've seen by various bits of evidence going back almost four million years. But they also say, because we don't have enough evidence in between those segments, we don't have enough in a chain going all the way back to show this microevolution. It could have happened in rapid spurts of evolution, followed by long periods of stasis, where nothing really changed.
00:25:19
Speaker
It could happen either way. You see both types of evolution in the evolutionary record. So it could be either way. Right. Now, part of this is all tied up with this. When you're talking about evolution, a lot of things were changing kind of all at once. But again, over the course of millions of years. And one of those was the difficulty of human childbirth. And that may provide some answers into this elongated childhood. But basically, over the last few million years, our brains got bigger and our hips got narrower.
00:25:45
Speaker
And our hips got narrow because we were walking erect walking upright and your hips just had to kind of reconfigure to get under your spine to support the walking. Yeah. So, and as a consequence, we're still a little bit underdeveloped at birth. And it was mentioned in the article. I'd never really heard this, but I don't really travel in these circles and talk about these things, but some say they talk about the first year of life being like an almost a second gestation period.
00:26:09
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Like women are trying to push a large object through a very small hole. So babies need to be small enough to fit through that hole. And it seems like it developed or it evolutionarily developed to be smaller babies did so then you could fit through that hole and then, you know, continue developing once you're out, you know, once you've made it through that, that tiny little space that it's kind of amazing that women can even do that. I know. Right.
00:26:38
Speaker
Yay, good for you, mothers. That's ridiculous. But of course, this doesn't explain everything. Because once your baby is born, they're evolutionarily speaking, they're free to grow and develop as rapidly into adulthood as any other species, right? Yes. But still we don't. But still we don't. So why? Yeah. So we need to look beyond childbirth to prehistoric children. And until recently, this has been relatively ignored by archaeologists. Not you. I have always thought about it. Not you, archaeologists. I know.
00:27:05
Speaker
I know you've always thought about this. You've always talked about how could children have factored into whatever story we're looking at. Even just the last story with the ice skates, you're talking about children and how they could have factored in. So yeah. And I feel like I'm going to jump down to one of my other bullet points right here because it's going to make sense in a minute. But there was another recent study. Where do I have that? A 2000, not recent, a 2008 study suggested that children made up between 40 and 60 percent of prehistoric populations. Yeah.
00:27:34
Speaker
So when you look at, you know, either badly made projectile points or malformed artifacts or different things, and you either say, well, this was somebody learning, which is probably true, or this is, you know, whatever it is. And you look at something else like a tiny axe and you say it's ritual.
00:27:51
Speaker
When you have children making up such a high percent of the population, which makes sense, people had to have a lot of babies in that time to survive.
Role of Children in Prehistoric Societies
00:27:58
Speaker
So you might have 10 babies and only two of them survived to adulthood, who knows, right? So there's going to be a lot of kids running around just messing up a lot of stuff, right? And you need to distract them with toys.
00:28:08
Speaker
Well, and not only that, but when 40 to 60% of a community is children, they have to participate. They have to participate. They have to help either hunt or gather or whatever it is that their community is doing. You know, if it's in agriculture times and they have to farm, like they have to help participate or else they simply will not be fed. So I'm sure the adults are bringing the children into learning the skills they need to survive fairly early because they had to, they just did.
00:28:35
Speaker
Yeah. And like I said, sometimes they just are getting in the way and you need to distract them. Kids are kids in any timeframe, right? So I'm going to jump ahead a little bit to one of my other points here. And there's, cause there's a picture of this in the article, but there's what they call an owl plaque. And it's basically this flat tablet like thing that has a picture of an owl on it. And they said this could also, this was from Bronze Age Spain. And they said this could also been a child's toy. And I'm like, wow, nothing's changed. They're still just giving them a tablet and say, be quiet.
00:29:05
Speaker
What it makes me think of is, so my mom and I do like a big cookie baking sesh, like every Christmas, right? That's one of the things that she and I do together. Hey, I peel stuff sometimes and chop. You've been known to peel an apple or two or 50. And sometimes when we're doing these big cookie baking sessions, we've got a niece or two hanging around who as of right now, our ages,
00:29:31
Speaker
three and five, I think. And when they're hanging around with you, sometimes you just have to give them something to do so that they will leave you alone so that you can get your job done. And like this, one of the times when the older niece was hanging around with us, she, we were making biscotti and she wanted the help. We literally gave her her own little like biscotti log of dough. And we're like, here you go. This is yours. Just roll it out and try to copy what we're doing. And she was sitting on her end of the counter, just like following along with us.
00:30:00
Speaker
It was really cute, and she learned how to roll a little biscotti lock. It was perfect. I know. Anytime you're finding a fire pit that might have baked lumps of clay and things like that, I'm sure people were sitting around a fire trying to make pots and whatever they're doing vessels, and they're just giving the kids some clay to mess with, and then they're trucking it into the fire. Just leave me alone.
00:30:20
Speaker
I've always said my favorite artifact I ever found in South Carolina was a piece of clay that had been fired and it was molded into the inside of somebody's fist. Like they squeezed it with their fist and then tossed it in the fire and forever it retained that shape, right? But it was very small, like much smaller than my hand. Either belonged to a very small woman or a child. And I could definitely see, given the kid a piece of clay, like, oh, go over there and play with it.
00:30:49
Speaker
Yeah. One of the things you and I both like is when we find either an object or a situation where it really just humanizes the situation and puts you in that environment, not just like looking at an artifact and saying, Oh, this is hunting magic and ritual and blah, blah, blah.
00:31:05
Speaker
So let's look at Bassura Cave in Italy. You can see a little bit of a snapshot of a family that lived 14,000 years ago. Now, this is all written as like a story, but there's archaeology to back this up. So yeah, it's not like we have a movie of this, you know, or an account. This article is really well written and it's backed up by all the science and stuff that you need to, but this is the story they tell in this article, which is great.
00:31:28
Speaker
So there was a man, a woman, a teenager, and two children, five people, a family, assumed it's a family. The youngest was about three years old. They walked barefoot and used burning sticks to light their way inside this cave. And it looks like one of the children collected mud from the floor and just smeared it all onto us to light mine. Like, who would do that and why? It's probably a child. Oh, it's a kid, right. Like, obviously. It reminds me again. Like, I'm looking out the window of our RV today, and there's like a preteen boy at the site across from us.
00:31:58
Speaker
And he's just out there like with a shovel digging holes. Why? Like not even one hole, just like holes, plural. There was zero reason to do that. Because kids are weird and they do weird stuff, right? That's true. Yeah.
00:32:12
Speaker
Yeah, it could have been a creative display or it could have been just playing. And that's what a lot of things we see in these environments are. And in fact, a 2022 study looked at hand stencils painted on cave walls in Europe, prehistoric Europe. And some were so small, they must have been made by infants with the help of course, infants didn't walk up and make them, but they were, you know, immortalizing their infant's hamperance. And like, there's plenty of people around today. I don't know if people still do this that have like,
00:32:37
Speaker
like molded hand and footprints of our infant children. The homemade salt clay or salt dough. Yeah, my sister did it with my two nieces. So yeah. Yeah, pre-star card likely had meaning for the people that made it like you would assume, but that doesn't mean they didn't have fun too and just like make some stuff.
Toys and Creativity in Prehistoric Times
00:32:55
Speaker
Yeah. You know, and I would always
00:32:57
Speaker
kind of argue that maybe even the stuff down low, I would, I would, I want to know if somebody would do some research on analyzing the things that are higher up and harder to reach versus the things that are lower down to the ground. And you'd have to do some analysis on the cave or the wall or something like that to try to figure out what it looked like a thousand, 2000, 20,000 years ago, because maybe some of the stuff higher up, there was a wall there and it's or a floor there and it's been eroded away, but who knows?
00:33:23
Speaker
It's an interesting idea because you'd almost have to bring like statistical differences into that because two things like an adult human can sit on the ground and reach the bottom of the wall. And also, I mean, you see it today, plenty of parents will just put their kids right up on their shoulders and then they can reach the higher parts of a wall. So you'd have to be like looking for a statistical difference.
00:33:48
Speaker
to see if maybe there's more child-like stuff down low and then more adult stuff up higher or whatever. But it would be an interesting project to take on. There you go, future grad student. All you. Do it.
00:34:01
Speaker
I know, and there are some people working on this, which is really cool. Just not enough that are considering it, I think. But if we want to see it, I feel like there's a lot of evidence that fun and games have been a part of childhood for a long time. You know, we've got all these examples. Another one, and this was actually tied with the Owl Plaque story. It's in the same set of pictures, if you look on the article.
00:34:20
Speaker
But there's also a bone disc that dates from 11,000 to 18,000 years ago, found in France. And they think this could have been a child's toy or something along those lines. Because there's a hole in the middle of it and a deer on either side. And both the deer are in different poses. They only show one side. I wish they'd shown both sides. I know. I really wish we could see both sides, yeah.
00:34:37
Speaker
Cause I would love to like print it out and try to see how this works. Yeah. But they say when a string is threaded through the hole, I'm imagining like a string going through and then you got both ends coming up and you're holding them in your hands and like that. But then when you spin the disc, it gives the illusion of the deer moving, like movement between the two positions, like a flip book. Like a flip book. Yeah. That's so cool. Like why not? Right? Sure. Definitely.
00:34:59
Speaker
And they say that many early toys were likely made of wood, as you would think they were, and have probably rotted away, like a lot of other wooden artifacts. But we still have footprints, and these footprints indicate play in some cases. There's a lot of places in Europe, and especially Africa, where you've had just hardened beach-side type of footprints, or maybe there was an ash deposit or something like that that hardened them, like they're totally track-wise and things like that, where you just see people
00:35:26
Speaker
you know, doing their thing and walking around. And then there's just this scattering of little tiny footprints. Yeah. Yeah. Again, think about your own kids, right? Or in our case, nieces and nephew and the way they like, it's, it feels like they take 14 steps for every like three of ours because they're running this way and running that way and circling around. And it's really cool that you can see that in track ways too, because if you start following the footprints and you see all the little, the little ones kind of circling around, it's just,
00:35:54
Speaker
Obviously, kids, kids being kids, running around. They weren't that different, you know, a thousand years ago or even a hundred thousand years ago, right? Like they weren't that different. So, yeah. Well, and there is a serious purpose to play like this. It's a way of learning new physical, psychological and social skills. I mean, you can see that today and it's a common, actually a common argument against homeschooling. People always say that, oh, they don't get socialized and they don't get to play with other kids, but
00:36:21
Speaker
I would almost agree with that, not being a parent or really having done the research only because that kind of makes sense. But also it depends on how you homeschool because there's lots of RVing families that homeschool, but these RVing kids get to travel around and see so many different things and meet new people at RV parks. And just, you know, they have a, almost a better social experience because they're not seeing the same people every day. Yeah. We've met some kids that were like really, really good at just socializing with adults. Yeah.
00:36:47
Speaker
probably because they're in this RV community and they interact with a lot more adults on the daily basis than maybe kids that are in school do. So, but I think it's important either way, like that play with other kids or play around adults, like you're learning social experiences and how to interact with other people. So, and you know, that's important to your development.
00:37:07
Speaker
He also mentioned in the article that in prehistory, the appearance of certain toys, like that disc and things like that, and play with those toys could have inspired some key human inventions, like the wheel and weaving and things like that. We could start playing with stuff with a purpose that they were not intended for. You might open somebody's eyes to saying, oh, look what they're doing with that. I could extrapolate that and do something else with it.
00:37:31
Speaker
And, you know, as our childhoods had been lengthening, it could have aided in other things like early foraging skills. A 2022 study of 28 modern foraging societies found that while it's easy to just forage for like fruits and nuts and things like that, like almost anybody can do that. The exploitation of resources such as tubers and game isn't mastered until adolescence or adulthood.
00:37:53
Speaker
Like you can try with it, but you really need to practice and learn it. You gotta really learn where to look or how to hunt and that kind of thing. But it makes sense to start with the easy stuff first, right? Because you do gain a basic set of skills that can then develop into with more time, again, the protracted childhood, but with more time you can learn the skills like those. Yeah.
00:38:14
Speaker
Ultimately, prehistoric children had complex lives filled with different activities and were always learning and exploring.
Learning and Innovation in Childhood
00:38:20
Speaker
And that is something that is true of children today and in the past. So again, not much different, right? They were learning how to navigate complex social situations and acquiring basic skills that would make them adults. Yeah.
00:38:33
Speaker
And April Noah says that as children grow, who they choose to learn from changes. You know, so they start, they start by learning, you know, basic skills from their parents, but in adolescence, they seek out other adults that maybe are doing things that are, you know, their parents can't provide them or, you know, it's a close tight knit village, things like that. Maybe they want to learn something else and they see somebody else doing that. So they go to learn from them.
00:38:53
Speaker
Yeah, that was one of the most interesting pieces of information from this article is that this transfer of information and like spread of innovation might be coming from teenagers, right? Yeah. And I know I'm not a teenager now, but
00:39:10
Speaker
I think of this very specific example, which is that I'm not sure my mom would know how to use her iPhone if it weren't for you and me and my other siblings who step in and help her and teach her about this new technological innovation that is not of her generation, but she has one and she uses it and she knows how to use it, but she's learned a lot of stuff
00:39:33
Speaker
on it, on how to continue growing in her skill set from us, her children. And I have no doubt that those precocious little children that are our nieces and nephew will be teaching us things someday as technology kind of moves beyond our skills as well. Like it's just the way of the technological development of the world today, it seems like, right?
00:39:54
Speaker
But it's interesting also how much things kids have to learn and can learn too, because your nieces are learning lots of different things about how to cook from your mom and her parents to a certain extent, but mostly from your mom. Mostly from my mom. My mom is the one who cooks with them.
00:40:09
Speaker
But the reality is, when they get into, you know, adolescence and then adulthood themselves, I mean, there's a pretty decent chance they're never gonna cook again in this world that we live in. They might be ordering stuff, they might be ready to make things that are more healthy, not like microwave meals and stuff like that. No, but nutritional. You know, as the world goes, people are starting to focus less on those sort of things and then, you know, those things that can be done by something else, basically. So, I don't know, that's just a guess and it probably won't happen, but who knows.
00:40:39
Speaker
It's interesting to think about though, right? Like there's information going back and forth right now, right? Like the older generation teaches the younger generation, but at some point are the skills that are going from the older to the younger going to be like not necessary anymore? Maybe it's possible.
00:40:55
Speaker
Well, I keep wondering things like, you know, my grandma's pretty old and she's not doing super great. She's doing pretty good for, for who she is, but we're going to be visiting her in a few weeks. But I always wonder, like, you know, I never really sit and talk to her and just kind of like learn from her, you know, and learn about her past and things like that. And I kind of want to sit down and do that because at some point it's not going to be there. Yeah, I know. I know. I mean, I've lost all of my grandparents at this point. Yeah.
00:41:21
Speaker
I went through a family genealogy phase maybe 15 years ago and I've actually lost that software. It was on, it was that old software we had on our old Mac like a long time ago. I wish I still had it. I should probably search for it some more on some of our old computers, but basically I sat down with my grandparents that were still alive and I just had them like tell me stories, not about
00:41:44
Speaker
It was more about different family members, like trying to learn about these people that I had never met because they died long before I was born. But now they're gone and I had, I need to find them. I had these stories from their mouths about the people that are gone and like, you know, keeping that link to the past, I think is important too. I don't know. I feel like we veered off of the topic that we're beginning with there, but
00:42:08
Speaker
I've kind of done a promo for the Archiotech podcast. If you want to know more about archival data formats and the problem of what kind of software do you record things on that will be permanent in the future, listen to the Archiotech podcast. I know, because I made the wrong choice back in the day. I'm sure that data is recoverable somehow. I just got to figure out how to do it. Said every archaeologist ever. I know. All right, with that, we're out. We're going to go watch this guy do crazy things some more. Yeah, totally. All right, bye.
00:42:44
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Archaeology Show. Feel free to comment and view the show notes on the website at www.arcpodnet.com. Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at arcpodnet. Music for this show is called, I Wish You Would Look, from the band C Hero. Again, thanks for listening, and have an awesome day.
00:43:07
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.