Speaker: Dr. April Nowell
It is estimated that in prehistoric societies children comprised at least forty to sixty-five percent of the population, yet by default, our ancestral landscapes are peopled by adults who hunt, gather, fish, knap tools and make art. But these adults were also parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles who had to make space physically, emotionally, intellectually, and cognitively for the infants, children and adolescents around them. The economic, social, and political roles of Paleolithic children are often understudied because they are assumed to be unknowable or negligible. Drawing on the most recent data from the cognitive sciences and from the ethnographic, fossil, archaeological, and primate records, this talk challenges these assumptions. By rendering the “invisible” children visible, a new understanding will be gained not of the contributions that children have made to the biological and cultural entities we are today.
Dr. April Nowell is a Paleolithic archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, Canada. She directs an international team of researchers in the study of Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites in Jordan and collaborates with colleagues on the study of cave art in Australia and France and on ostrich eggshell beads in South Africa. In 2016, she and her colleagues working in Jordan published the world’s oldest identifiable blood on stone tools, demonstrating that 300,000 years ago early humans ate a range of animals from duck to rhinoceros. Her team’s blood residue work was named one of Time Magazine’s top 100 discoveries. She is known for her publications on cognitive archaeology, Paleolithic art, the archaeology of children and the relationship between science, pop culture, and the media. She is the author of the new book Growing Up in the Ice Age.