Toys are us: How childhood objects may have shaped human history

Tantalising evidence hints that key human innovations including the wheel and weaving were the outcome of, quite literally, child's play

Humans 18 December 2018

baby playing

Playing fosters imagination, a crucial ingredient in technological innovation

Kelly Davidson/Plainpicture

FEW origin stories are as perplexing as the invention of the wheel. Thomas Edison famously claimed that genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration – for our ancestors, it was the 99 per cent that posed a problem. Even after they realised they could move objects with a rolling motion, they needed to refine their engineering skills enough to build a wheel that actually worked.

“Making a full-scale wheel takes a lot of physical resources, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of skill,” says Felix Riede, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. But how could any prehistoric inventor have afforded to pour so much blood, sweat and tears into experimentation when there were mouths to feed?

Inspired by his young son, Riede has come up with a surprising solution. He thinks that the skills required for technological innovation were honed through play. While the adults went about the serious work of ensuring the group’s survival, youngsters naturally experimented with the objects around them. If Riede is right, some of humanity’s most important inventions – including the wheel, weaving and projectile weapons – have their roots in children’s toys.

“Some of humanity’s key inventions could have their roots in children’s toys”

The idea that toys shaped humanity builds on a growing understanding of just how important play has been to the evolution of our brains. Analyses of remains such as teeth from ancient hominins show that our species, Homo sapiens, enjoys an unusually long childhood. An …

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