The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?

by Jared Diamond

  A less dangerous environment, where children can be given more freedom, is that of the Hadza in East Africa. It has leopards and other dangerous predators, as does the environment of the !Kung, but it differs from the !Kung environment in being hilly, so that it is possible to see greater distances, and parents can keep an eye on children playing at greater distances from a Hadza camp than from a !Kung camp. The New Guinea rainforests are also moderately safe: there are no dangerous mammals, many snakes are poisonous but they are rarely encountered, and the main danger is from other people. Hence I often see New Guinea children playing, walking, or canoeing by themselves, and my New Guinea friends tell me of spending much time in the forests by themselves as children.

  Among the safest environments are Australia’s deserts and Madagascar’s forests. In recent times Australian deserts have harbored no mammals dangerous to humans. Like New Guinea, Australia has a reputation for poisonous snakes, but one rarely comes across them unless one goes looking for them. Hence Martu children in the Australian desert regularly go out on foraging trips unsupervised by adults. Similarly, Madagascar’s forests harbor no large predators and few poisonous plants and animals, so children can safely go off by themselves in groups to dig yams.

  Multi-age playgroups

  On the American frontier, where population was sparse, the one-room schoolhouse was a common phenomenon. With so few children living within daily travel distance, schools could afford only a single room and a single teacher, and all children of different ages had to be educated together in that one room. But the one-room schoolhouse in the U.S. today is a romantic memory of the past, except in rural areas of low population density. Instead, in all cities, and in rural areas of moderate population density, children learn and play in age cohorts. School classrooms are age-graded, such that most classmates are within a year of each other in age. While neighborhood playgroups are not so strictly age-segregated, in densely populated areas of large societies there are enough children living within walking distance of each other that 12-year-olds don’t routinely play with 3-year-olds. That norm of age cohorts applies not only to modern societies with state governments and schools, but also to populous pre-state societies, because of the same basic demographic fact: many children close in age, living in proximity. For example, many African chiefdoms have or had age cohorts, in which children close in age were initiated and circumcised at the same time, and (among the Zulu) boys of the same age formed military cohorts.

  But demographic realities produce a different result in small-scale societies, which resemble one-room schoolhouses. A typical hunter-gatherer band numbering around 30 people will on the average contain only about a dozen pre-adolescent kids, of both sexes and various ages. Hence it is impossible to assemble separate age-cohort playgroups, each with many children, as is characteristic of large societies. Instead, all children in the band form a single multi-age playgroup of both sexes. That observation applies to all small-scale hunter-gatherer societies that have been studied.

  In such multi-age playgroups, both the older and the younger children gain from being together. The young children gain from being socialized not only by adults by also by older children, while the older children acquire experience in caring for younger children. That experience gained by older children contributes to explaining how hunter-gatherers can become confident parents already as teen-agers. While Western societies have plenty of teen-aged parents, especially unwed teen-agers, Western teen-agers are suboptimal parents because of inexperience. However, in a small-scale society, the teen-agers who become parents will already have been taking care of children for many years (Plate 38).

  For example, while I was spending some time in a remote New Guinea village, a 12-year-old girl named Morcy was designated to cook for me. When I returned to the village two years later, I found that Morcy had gotten married in the intervening time and was now, at the age of 14, holding her first child. I at first thought: surely there is a mistake about her age, and she really is 16 or 17? But Morcy’s father was the man who kept the village birth and death record book, and he had recorded her date of birth himself. I then thought: how on earth can a girl only 14 years old be a competent mother? In the United States, it would even be forbidden by law for a man to marry such a young girl. But Morcy seemed to be dealing in a self-assured way with her child, no differently from older mothers at the village. I finally reflected that Morcy had already had years of experience in taking care of young children. At age 14, she was better qualified to be a parent than I had been when I became a father at age 49.

  Another phenomenon affected by multi-age playgroups is premarital sex, which is reported from all well-studied small hunter-gatherer societies. Most large societies consider some activities as suitable for boys, and other activities as suitable for girls. They encourage boys and girls to play separately, and there are enough boys and girls to form single-sex playgroups. But that’s impossible in a band where there are only a dozen children of all ages. Because hunter-gatherer children sleep with their parents, either in the same bed or in the same hut, there is no privacy. Children see their parents having sex. In the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski was told that parents took no special precautions to prevent their children from watching them having sex: they just scolded the child and told it to cover its head with a mat. Once children are old enough to join playgroups of other children, they make up games imitating the various adult activities that they see, so of course they have sex games, simulating intercourse. Either the adults don’t interfere with child sex play at all, or else !Kung parents discourage it when it becomes obvious, but they consider child sexual experimentation inevitable and normal. It’s what the !Kung parents themselves did as children, and the children are often playing out of sight where the parents don’t see their sex games. Many societies, such as the Siriono and Piraha and New Guinea Eastern Highlanders, tolerate open sexual play between adults and children.

  Child play and education

  After the first night that I spent in a New Guinea Highland village, I woke up the next morning to hear the shouts of village boys playing outside my hut. Instead of playing hopscotch or pulling toy cars, they were playing tribal war. Each boy had a small bow, together with a quiver of arrows with tips of wild grass, which hurt but didn’t injure a boy when he was struck. The kids were divided into two groups, shooting arrows at each other, a boy in each group advancing to come close to an “enemy” boy before firing an arrow at him, but bobbing and darting from side to side to avoid being hit himself, and quickly running back to attach a new arrow. It was a realistic imitation of an actual Highland war, except that the arrows were non-lethal, the participants were boys rather than men, and they belonged to the same village and were laughing.

  This “game” that introduced me to life in the New Guinea Highlands is typical of so-called educational play of children around the world. Much child play is imitation of adult activities that the children see, or hear about in stories told by adults. The kids play for fun, but their play serves the function of letting them practise things that they will later have to do as adults. For instance, among the Dani people of the New Guinea Highlands, the anthropologist Karl Heider observed that educational play of children imitates everything that goes on in the world of Dani adults, except rituals reserved for adults. Dani games imitating adult life include fighting battles with grass spears; using spears or sticks to “kill” “armies” of berries, rolled realistically back and forth to imitate warriors advancing and retreating; target practice at hanging moss and at ant hives; hunting birds for fun; building imitation huts and imitation gardens with ditches; dragging around a flower attached to a string, as if it were a pig, and calling it by the Dani words meaning “pig-pig”; and gathering at night around a fire, watching a burning stick fall, and pretending that the person to whom the stick points will become one’s future brother-in-law.

  Whereas adult life and child’s play in the New Guinea Highlands revolve around wars and pig
s, adult life among the Nuer people in the Sudan revolves around cattle. Hence the games of Nuer children also center around cattle: children build toy kraals (cattle enclosures) out of sand, ashes, and mud, and they fill the toy kraals with toy mud figures of cattle, which they then play at herding. Among the Mailu people who live on the coast of New Guinea and use sail canoes and catch fish, games of children include sailing a toy canoe, using a toy net, and using a toy fish spear. Yanamamo Indian children in Brazil and Venezuela play at exploring the plants and animals of the Amazon rainforest in which they live. As a result, they become knowledgeable naturalists at an early age.

  Among the Siriono Indians of Bolivia, an infant boy only three months old already receives a tiny bow and arrow from his father, although he will not be able to use it for several years. By the time the boy is 3, he begins shooting at non-living targets, then at insects, next at birds, then at age 8 the boy begins to accompany his father on hunting trips, and by age 12 the boy is a full-fledged hunter. By age 3, Siriono girls begin to play with a miniature spindle, spin, make baskets and pots, and help their mother at household tasks. The boy’s bow and arrow and the girl’s spindle are the only Siriono toys. The Siriono have no organized games equivalent to our games of tag or hide-and-seek, except that boys wrestle.

  In contrast to all those “educational games” that imitate adult activities and prepare children for them, there are other Dani games that Karl Heider considered non-educational, in that they were not obviously training children to execute small versions of eventual adult activities. They included making figures out of string, making designs of knotted grass, somersaulting down a hill, and leading around a rhinoceros beetle by a leash made of a grass stalk forced into the hole made by breaking off the beetle’s horns. These are examples of what is termed “child culture”: children learning to get along with other children, and playing games that have nothing to do with becoming an adult. However, the line between educational and non-educational games can be blurred. For example, one Dani game of string figures consists of making two loops representing a man and a woman who meet from each side and “copulate,” while leading a beetle on a leash could be considered practice for leading a pig on a leash.

  A regular feature of the games of hunter-gatherer societies and the smallest farming societies is their lack of competition or contests. Whereas many American games involve keeping score and are about winning and losing, it is rare for hunter-gatherer games to keep score or identify a winner. Instead, games of small-scale societies often involve sharing, to prepare children for adult life that emphasizes sharing and discourages contests. An example is the game of cutting up and sharing a banana that Jane Goodale described for New Britain’s Kaulong people and that I related on page 91.

  Modern American society differs from traditional societies in the number, source, and claimed function of toys. American toy manufacturers heavily promote so-called educational toys to foster so-called creative play (Plate 18). American parents are taught to believe that manufactured store-bought toys are important to the development of their children. In contrast, traditional societies have few or no toys, and any toys that do exist are made either by the child itself or by the child’s parents. An American friend who spent his childhood in rural Kenya told me that some of his Kenyan friends were very inventive, and used sticks and string to build their own small cars with wheels and axles (Plate 17). One day, my American friend and his Kenyan friend tried to harness a pair of giant Goliath beetles to pull a toy cart that they had built. The two boys spent a whole afternoon at their game, but despite hours of effort they could not get the two beetles to pull in coordination. When my friend returned as a teen-ager to the United States and watched American children playing with their plastic ready-made store-bought toys, he gained the impression that American children are less creative than Kenyan children.

  In modern state societies, there is formal education: schools and after-hour classes, in which specially trained instructors teach children material set by school boards, as an activity separate from play. But education in small-scale societies is not a separate activity. Instead, children learn in the course of accompanying their parents and other adults, and of hearing stories told by adults and older children around the campfire. For instance, Nurit Bird-David wrote as follows about southern India’s Nayaka people: “At a time where in modern societies children begin schooling, say at age 6, Nayaka children independently go hunting small game, visiting and staying with other families, free from supervision by their own specific parents, though not necessarily from adults…. Teaching, additionally, is done in a very subtle way. No formal instruction and memorizing here, no classes, no exams, no cultural sites [schools] in which packages of knowledge, abstracted from their context, are transmitted from one person to another. Knowledge is inseparable from social life.”

  As another example, among Africa’s Mbuti Pygmies studied by Colin Turnbull, children imitate their parents by playing with a tiny bow and arrow, a strip of a hunting net, or a miniature basket (Plate 20), and by building a miniature house, catching frogs, and chasing a cooperative grandparent who agrees to pretend to be an antelope. “For children, life is one long frolic interspersed with a healthy sprinkle of spankings and slappings…. And one day they find that the games they have been playing are not games any longer, but the real thing, for they have become adults. The hunting is now real hunting; their tree climbing is in earnest search of inaccessible honey; their acrobatics on the swings are repeated almost daily, in other forms, in the pursuit of elusive game, or in avoiding the malicious forest buffalo. It happens so gradually that they hardly notice the change at first, for even when they are proud and famous hunters their life is still full of fun and laughter.”

  Whereas for small-scale societies education follows naturally from social life, in some modern societies even the rudiments of social life require explicit education. For example, in parts of modern American cities where people do not know their neighbors, and where car traffic and potential kidnappers and a lack of sidewalks mean that children cannot safely walk to play with other kids, children have to be taught formally how to play with other children in classes termed “mommy and me classes.” There, a mother or another care-giver brings her child to a classroom with a trained teacher and a dozen other children and their mothers. The children sit in an inner circle, the mothers and care-givers sit in an outer circle and gain experience of child play, and the children are taught how to take turns speaking, listening, and handing objects back and forth to other children. There are many features of modern American society that my New Guinea friends consider bizarre, but nothing astonished them more than being told that American children need specified places, times, and instruction in order to learn how to meet and play with each other.

  Their kids and our kids

  Finally, let’s reflect on differences in child-rearing practices between small-scale societies and state societies. Of course, there is much variation among industrial state societies today in the modern world. Ideals and practices of raising children differ between the U.S., Germany, Sweden, Japan, and an Israeli kibbutz. Within any given one of those state societies, there are differences between farmers, urban poor people, and the urban middle class. There are also differences from generation to generation within a given state society: child-rearing practices in the U.S. today are unlike those prevalent in the 1930s.

  Nevertheless, there are still some basic similarities among all of those state societies, and some basic differences between state and non-state societies. State governments have their own separate interests regarding the state’s children, and those interests do not necessarily coincide with the interests of a child’s parents. Small-scale non-state societies also have their own interests, but a state society’s interests are more explicit, administered by more centralized top-down leadership, and backed up by well-defined enforcing powers. All states want children who, as adults, will become useful and obedient citizens, soldiers,
and workers. States tend to object to having their future citizens killed at birth, or permitted to become burned by fires. States also tend to have views about the education of their future citizens, and about their citizens’ sexual conduct. Those shared goals of states promote some convergence among states in their policies regarding children; the child-rearing practices of non-state societies vary over a much wider spectrum than do the practices of state societies. Within non-state societies, hunter-gatherer societies are subject to convergent pressures of their own: they share some basic similarities of child-rearing with each other, but as a group they differ from states as a group.

  States do have military and technological advantages, and advantages of vastly larger populations, over hunter-gatherers. Throughout recent millennia, those advantages have enabled states to conquer hunter-gatherers, so that the modern world map is now divided completely among states, and few hunter-gatherer groups have survived. But even though states are much more powerful than hunter-gatherer bands, that doesn’t necessarily imply that states have better ways of raising their children. Some child-rearing practices of hunter-gatherer bands may be ones that we could consider emulating.

  Naturally, I’m not saying that we should emulate all child-rearing practices of hunter-gatherers. I don’t recommend that we return to the hunter-gatherer practices of selective infanticide, high risk of death in childbirth, and letting infants play with knives and get burned by fires. Some other features of hunter-gatherer childhoods, like the permissiveness of child sex play, feel uncomfortable to many of us, even though it may be hard to demonstrate that they really are harmful to children. Still other practices are now adopted by some citizens of state societies, but make others of us uncomfortable—such as having infants sleep in the same bedroom or in the same bed as parents, nursing children until age three or four, and avoiding physical punishment of children.