The article discusses the role of toys and tools in the development of skills and cultural transmission in hunter-gatherer societies. The authors present a cross-cultural inventory of objects made for and by hunter-gatherer children and adolescents, finding that toys and tools were primarily handled outside of explicit pedagogical contexts, and there is little evidence for formalised apprenticeships. The authors suggest that children's self-directed interactions with objects, especially during play, have a critical role in early-age enskillment. Both boys and girls tend to use objects in work and play that emulate the gendered division of labor in their communities, and many objects made by and for children had full-scale counterparts. Finally, the authors argue that the peer group is crucial to skill acquisition in hunter-gatherer societies.

Authors undertook two studies to investigate the natures of work and play cross-culturally in children ages 6-10. The first study investigated potential variables affecting cross-cultural variation in the degree of children's contribution to economic work. The second study investigated the degree to which (and variables affecting why) forms of child's play reflect economic work and/or adult activities across various cultures.

The authors explore coalitional play fighting (in which teams of at least two play against each other to achieve a goal) across hunter-gatherer societies, with the theory that play of this type may be a mechanism for assessing strength and utility for future defense or warfare. When played against other communities, they propose coalitional play fighting can also serve to gauge strength of potential allies or formidability of potential enemies. In order to test their theories, they predict that, despite the large energy cost and risk of sports associated with coalitional play fighting, these types of games will be widespread in hunter-gatherer societies. In addition, they predict that of those exhibiting coalitional play fighting, many will play against other communities. In support of their hypotheses, they find that 54% of hunter-gatherer societies examined exhibit coalitional play fighting, of which 81% play against other communities.

This article builds upon gender inequality theory to examine childhood gender inequality in preindustrial societies. Multivariate and cluster analysis are used.

This study reanalyzes data from a previous study on variations in children's play from the Six Cultures project. Data described four types of play: role play, fantasy play, imaginative play, and creative-constructive play. Results shed light on the interplay between cultural, historial, economic and material conditions on the type and amount of play, as well as gender differences in play.

This article tests a model for the patterning of the sexual division of children's labor.

The idea that archaic humans used wooden clubs as weapons is popular but not based on much archaeological evidence, due to the poor preservation of organic materials in the archaeological record. A new study analyzed 57 recent hunting-gathering societies and found that the majority used clubs for violence and/or hunting. The use of throwing sticks was less frequent. The study suggests that the use of clubs by early humans was highly probable, but that prehistoric weapons may have been quite sophisticated and carried strong symbolic meaning. The great variation in the forms and use of clubs and throwing sticks among recent hunter-gatherers suggests that similar variation may have existed in the past.

This article examined the presence of ostensive-communicative behaviors in educational storytelling within foraging cultures. Ostensive communication includes prosody and gestures used to direct attention to something or someone. The author analyzed 14 behaviors of ostensive communication and tested whether they co-occur with the transmission of knowledge in storytelling. All 53 forager cultures examined demonstrated the use of 2 or more of those communicative behaviors in oral storytelling. This supports the author’s claim of ostensive-communicative behavior as a universal pedagogical tool in forager cultures.

This paper seeks to understand the roles played by children and adolescents in hunter-gatherer societies in relation to their social and ecological context. The authors set out to investigate how environmental factors, ecological risk, and the energetic contributions of adult men and women to food production may have influenced children/adolescent allocation of time to child care, domestic work, food production, and play. In order to carry out this study, the authors logged the behaviors of 690 children and adolescents from twelve hunter-gatherer and mixed-subsistence societies (Agta, Aka, Baka, BaYaka, Dukha, Hadza, Matsi-genka, Maya, Mayangna, Mikea, Pume, and Tsimane), totaling 85,597 unique observations. The study found that harsh environmental factors were not associated with child/adolescent time allocation, but that local ecological risk such as dangerous animals and lack of water availability predicted decreased time allocation to child care and domestic work, and that increased adult female participation in food production was associated with less time invested in child care among boys. It also found that all gendered differences in time allocation among children were stronger when men made greater contributions to food production than women. The authors interpret these results to signify that parents may play a role in preparing their children for environmental and ecological difficulty in order to help them develop skills that will help them become useful community members as adults.

This dissertation discusses the divided theoretical approach to how reincarnation, animism, spirits, and general religious beliefs occur within societies cross-culturally. Matlock offers evidence to support Tyler, contradicting the generally accepted Durkheimian approach, arguing that the belief about souls and spirits may originate in dreams and other empirical experiences, in turn informing and shaping social organization. Durkheim argued the opposite, claiming that religious beliefs reflect social organization such as the clan and kinship. The author states 33 quantitative hypotheses to be tested using 30 of the first 60 sample societies available in the HRAF Probability Sample.