discussion about ‘style’ versus ‘types’ in mind, I remain pessimistic about the possibility to unambiguously trace group identity in the early Upper Paleolithic.

Acknowledgements I thank Miriam Haidle, Jürgen Richter, and Thorsten Uthmeier for very helpful comments.

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Abstract The life history pattern of modern humans is characterized by the insertion of childhood and adolescent stages into the typical primate pattern. It is widely recognized that this slowing of the maturational process provides humans with additional years to learn, transmit, practice and modify cultural behaviors. In both human and non-human primates a significant amount of their respective dependency periods are spent in play. In contrast to modern humans, Neanderthals experienced shorter childhoods. This is significant as there is extensive psychological and neurobiological evidence that it is during infancy, childhood and adolescence that milestones in social and cognitive learning are reached and that play and play deprivation have a direct impact on this development. Faster maturation rates and thus shorter childhoods relative to modern humans lessen the impact of learning through play on the connectivity of the brain. In the context of play behavior, humans are unique in that adult humans play more than adults of any other species and they alone engage in fantasy play. Fantasy play is part of a package of symbol-based cognitive abilities that includes self-awareness, language, and theory of mind. Its benefits include creativity, behavioral plasticity, imagination, apprenticeship and planning. Differences in the nature of symbolic material culture of Neanderthals and modern humans suggest that Neanderthals were not capable of engaging in human-grade fantasy play.

Keywords Middle Paleolithic Upper Paleolithic Life history Brain Behavioral plasticity Cognitive development Fantasy Imagination Archaeology of children

A. Nowell (&)

Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria, STN CSC, P.O. Box 3050, Victoria, BC V8W 3P5, Canada

e-mail: anowell@uvic.ca

Introduction

In prehistoric societies children likely comprised at least forty to sixty-five percent of the population (Baxter 2005, 2008), yet the archaeological literature, if not the archaeological record itself, has largely been silent about the lives they lived and the contributions they made (e.g., see discussions in Sofaer Derevenski 1997; Kamp 2001; Shea 2006). Children’s play and their unconventional use of material culture were, until recently, believed to introduce a randomizing and distorting element into the archaeological record (Baxter 2005, 2008). Children were not only unknown, they were unknowable. This chapter, however, argues that children’s play is in fact serious business and that an understanding of how experiences garnered in childhood shape the brain may be key to documenting the evolution of unique aspects of human cognition and behavior. While this chapter is not about ‘finding’ children and their material culture in the Paleolithic record per se it does focus on childhood as a crucial ontological stage for cognitive maturation and on the implications for behavior and cultural capacity in having a longer period of neural development.

This chapter begins by describing the slowing of the human maturation process and the emergence of childhood and adolescence stages in human life history. Then, maturation rates and lengths of childhood are compared between Neanderthals and modern humans based on game changing studies of dental, brain and somatic growth and development. Next, extensive psychological and neurobiological evidence is presented that suggests that it is during infancy, childhood and adolescence that milestones in social and cognitive learning are reached and that play and play deprivation have a direct impact on this development. By way of discussion and conclusion, it is argued that Neanderthals had shorter childhoods and this influenced the adults they became and the material culture they produced. It is further argued that the key to understanding hominin

cognitive abilities lies not in absolute brain size or encephalization quotients but rather in our ability to reconstruct the childhoods of our hominin ancestors and to use the biological and archaeological evidence to piece together how they spent that time.

Human Life History

Life history can be defined as “the allocation of an organism’s energy for growth, maintenance and reproduction… [and is] a life strategy adopted by an organism to maximize fitness in a world of limited energy” (Dean and Smith 2009:115). Life history is sometimes referred to as reproductive turnover or ‘the speed of life’ (Stearns 1992; Nowell 2010). Following this metaphor, it is often said that primates have the slowest life histories of all the mammals (Harvey and Clutton-Brock 1985; Zimmermann and Radespiel 2007; Robson and Wood 2008) and, by extension, one might infer that humans experience the slowest life histories of all the primates but the emerging picture of human life history is at once more complex and more elegant (Nowell 2010).

As paleoanthropologists, we are accustomed to thinking in terms of k-strategists and r-strategists. Relative to r-strategists, k-strategists reach the age of reproduction more slowly, have fewer numbers of offspring, and put greater investment in each offspring. While k-strategists are thought to produce high quality offspring, the drawback to being a slow reproducer is that you risk dying before you reproduce (Robson and Wood 2008; Dean and Smith 2009:101). But humans are unique in that they have elements of an r-strategy within the larger life history of a k-strategist. Specifically, they have a long gestation period, a large brain, mature more slowly with females reaching the age of reproduction later, experience an extended dependency period, and enjoy increased longevity, but at the same time they have evolved shorter birth spacing, they wean sooner, and have more dependents than expected for an ape that matures at the age modern humans do (Robson and Wood 2008). Essentially, modern humans are characterized by a reproductive pattern that works twice as fast as that of the great apes (Dean and Smith 2009:115) – something that Wood (1994) has described as secondary r-selection. Added to this unique combination of features are a suite of derived elements – concealed ovulation, helpless young, rapid postnatal brain growth in infants, continued dependency after weaning, paternal care, and vigorous post-menopausal life in females (Bogin 1997; Kaplan 2002; Hawkes et al. 2003; Leigh 2004, 2012; Zimmermann and Radespiel 2007; Dean and Smith 2009:115; Robson and Wood 2008). Thus, modern humans have developed a strategy of producing high quality offspring while at the same time reducing the risk of

dying before maturation by ‘living fast’ in some respects, within an overall pattern of ‘living slow’.

This slowing of the human maturation process relative to other primates has led to the development of two unique life history stages in humans. Human biologists divide human life history into five stages – infancy (from birth to weaning), childhood (from weaning to the eruption of M1), juvenile (from M1 to puberty and the onset of the adolescent growth spurt), adolescence (from the onset of the adolescent growth spurt to the cessation of the growth and maturation) and adulthood (Mace 2000; Bogin 2003, 2009) with the stages of childhood and adolescence being unique to humans. It should be noted that the term childhood (and adolescence for that matter) is often thought of as a cultural construct and depending on the context it can be. We know that crossculturally and over time what it means phenomenologically to ‘be a child’ varies greatly (e.g., Kamp 2001; Baxter 2008; Konner 2010) but the terms ‘childhood’ and ‘adolescence’ are used here as biologically defined stages of human development dependent on anatomical markers that permit comparisons between species.

The slowing of the maturation process in humans, as Bogin (2003:32) notes, is significant as the childhood stage “adds an additional four years of relatively slow growth and allows for behavioral experience that further enhances developmental plasticity” (see also Neubauer and Hublin 2012) while adolescence further extends this period of growth and development with additional years to learn, practice, transmit, modify and innovate upon aspects of their culture. Data from pediatric fMRI studies of prefrontal cortical activity suggest that attention, memory and inhibition – all key elements of working memory – continue to develop during childhood and adolescence (Casey et al. 2000) with the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex, the region most closely associated with working memory, the last region of the brain to mature and develop (Casey et al. 2000; Vuontela et al. 2003; Paus 2005; Durston and Casey 2006; Neubauer and Hublin 2012).

Childhood in Neanderthals and Modern

Humans

Current data suggest that while Neanderthals matured more slowly than earlier hominins such as Homo erectus, they matured more quickly than modern humans and experienced a shorter childhood as a result. For instance, Smith et al. (2010) concluded based on a synchrotron virtual histology study of a Middle Paleolithic dental sample from Neanderthal and early modern human juveniles that Neanderthals matured more quickly than their modern human counterparts do. They found that both have an “extended duration of