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By David Robson
Playing fosters imagination, a crucial ingredient in technological innovationKelly Davidson/Plainpicture
You can read this premium archive article for free as part of New Scientist’s 2022 advent calendar. To enjoy this and other festive gems, sign-up to become a registered reader for free.
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?Advertisement
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 extended infancy gives more time for imaginative play, which has been shown to train many important cognitive skills, including counterfactual thinking – the ability to ask “what if…” – and the capacity to envisage different scenarios. According to April Nowell at the University of Victoria in Canada, this might explain why we are the only species with such a rich symbolic and artistic culture.
Surprisingly, however, no one had examined toys in the archaeological record as objects that might have influenced the cognitive development of our ancestors – until Riede was inspired by the rising tide of plastic around his sons. “As soon as you have children, your home becomes flooded with playthings,” he says. This is not limited to the West: in almost every modern society, children play with miniature versions of adult objects.
A few psychological studies have shown that the characteristics of toys can have a direct influence on the cognitive development of children. In one experiment, kids playing with open-ended toys – building blocks that can be put together in many different ways, rather than ones forming a particular structure – tended to be better at solving so-called “divergent” problems. These require us to generate many solutions, such as finding new uses for a familiar object. Playthings can also help a child understand mechanical properties, such as the motion of a rolling ball, and practise social roles, such as parenting a doll. “Toys facilitate and also limit the kinds of cognitive activities and thinking that children engage in,” says Riede.
According to his hypothesis, prehistoric toys allowed children to explore new uses and adaptations of familiar objects while they played. This would have equipped them with greater technological understanding and the more-flexible outlook that underpins greater creativity. “It’s this cognitive priming that loads the dice in favour of an innovation that actually works,” says Riede. If he is right, you would expect to see some trace of this process in the archaeological record, with the presence of certain toys somehow pre-empting big cultural shifts in related technologies.
Inspired by play
It is early days for this idea, but Riede, Nowell and their colleagues recently published a paper outlining some intriguing case studies. For instance, examining the archaeological records of communities living in Greenland from around 4500 years ago, they found that the early colonisers lacked toys and also showed little innovation in their material culture, whereas the Thule, who migrated into Greenland around 800 years ago, had many miniature objects that appear to have been designed specifically for child’s play, including toy kayaks, sledges, weapons and dolls. Their appearance seemed to coincide with an explosion of new adult technologies, such as advanced designs for harpoons, sophisticated boats and elaborate clothes. The chronology isn’t refined enough to determine which emerged first, the toys or the advanced technology, but Riede thinks the two may have grown together, with the richer material culture inspiring new play objects, which in turn primed the young minds for further innovation.
The team also points to sites in Western Cape, South Africa, dating back 60,000 to 80,000 years ago. Analyses of rock fragments suggest that novices, presumably children, were mimicking the adults’ stone knapping, producing crude and functionally useless copies of real tools. This “play-copying” again seems to coincide with sophisticated new technologies, including the first arrowheads, suggesting that the childhood games might have sparked greater cultural innovation.
Meanwhile, spinning whorls essential for the production of fabrics may have been inspired by “rondelles”, threaded discs engraved with pictures of animals. Archaeologists believe that these discs, found in Europe during the Late Stone Age, would have spun around the thread to alternate between the images on either side, a bit like a prehistoric flick-book. “There is cognitive overlap between the idea of these spinning discs and the idea that you can use rotation for a purpose – to make fibres,” says Riede.
Jason Raish
It is the invention of the wheel, however, that offers the most compelling support for Riede’s idea. The oldest evidence of wheeled vehicles suggests that the technology emerged around 5500 years ago, across western Eurasia – in the northern Caucasus, Mesopotamia and central and northern Europe. But some two centuries beforehand, we see small models of animals with holes drilled through their feet for an axle, and ceramic discs that functioned as wheels. The tops of the animals were hollowed, leading to the suggestion that they were ornate drinking vessels, perhaps used during rituals. But given their size and the fact that miniature animals are playthings in many modern cultures, Riede believes that they were toys. “You could easily call them quite cute,” he says.
If so, like any toddler with a train set today, children playing with those toys would have been getting to grips with the mechanics of rotary motion. They might have used their toys to carry various objects, and practised different ways of propelling them – from the front or the back, or letting them roll down a slope. They might even have experimented with wheels of different sizes, or made from different materials. As the children grew up, those same skills would have helped them make the cognitive leap necessary to imagine a wagon, whereas a society that lacked those toys would have struggled to envisage a workable design.
“A society that lacked toys with wheels would have struggled to envisage a workable wagon”
Perhaps the early inventors even used toys to produce prototypes. “You could easily make 100 of these miniature figures, all different, play around with them – quite literally – and then see what sort of design works best,” says Riede.
Archaeologist Michelle Langley at Griffith University in South East Queensland, Australia, agrees that the idea is worth further study. “You don’t just wake up one day as an adult, able to do all these things. You need to practise and to get familiar with the raw materials and how they work,” she says. “There’s this big learning process and you need to start young.”
Like Riede, Langley has been inspired by her own child’s behaviour. She recently published an article arguing that various archaeological objects, including rondelles and clay figurines often seen as ritual objects, should be reinterpreted as playthings. Animal figures, for instance, might have been important to teach children about hunting. “It’s easier when you have these little props.”
Langley is currently designing a study that will involve giving replicas of prehistoric objects to small children to help determine the characteristic patterns of wear and tear that come with play – whether they become smooth and polished, or cracked and chipped, for instance. This should then allow archaeologists to better identify which artefacts really were toys, perhaps providing further evidence for Riede’s hypothesis.
Riede, Langley and Nowell are now planning to organise a conference in Australia that will draw together scientists from diverse disciplines to explore exactly how children, so long overlooked by archaeologists, drove cultural change. Riede is excited about what they might find. “We need to look at the stuff we already have with new eyes and from a different angle because the children’s material culture is really important for understanding long-term trajectories of innovation and creativity,” he says.
If they are right, our greatest advances might truly have been child’s play.
Fight clubs
Team sports have long been known to bring out our tribal instincts. But did they first emerge to train us for warfare? That’s the hypothesis of Michelle Scalise Sugiyama at the University of Oregon.
She scoured the ethnographic record for information about the physical strategies used by traditional societies during their typical battles, such as when they raid another camp. Her final list of eight items included moves such as kicking, striking and blocking blows to the body, throwing and dodging objects, and group coordination. “They have to track the behaviours and infer the intentions of multiple individuals,” says Scalise Sugiyama. She then compared this list with ethnographic accounts of team games, many of which resembled Western sports such as rugby.
Sure enough, 36 per cent of the societies played a game incorporating at least half of the strategies that are crucial for battle. Scalise Sugiyama thinks this is probably an underestimate because anthropologists sometimes see such games as trivial activities. “If you’re lucky, you get a couple of pages of information,” she says. But if team sports do serve an important evolutionary function, we should take play more seriously.
This article appeared in print under the headline “R toys us?”
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By Paul Raeburn and Kevin Zollman
Morgan Schweitzer
As the holidays near, we eagerly anticipate spending time with our nearest and dearest. When we gather in the warmth of the hearth, we’re so happy to see them – that is, until we end up at each other’s throats.
How do we encourage our families to behave themselves in a way that reflects how, deep down, they truly love each other? Turn to game theory, the science of strategic thinking.
Game theory underpins everything from negotiations over the broadcasting rights of big sports fixtures to schemes for improving organ donation. The mathematics of the prisoner’s dilemma – one of the field’s most famous problems – have even been applied to the hunt for new life forms in space.Advertisement
You already know more about it than you realise: whenever you find yourself considering what you should do in terms of how someone else might respond, that’s game theory. But brushing up your know-how could help you preserve family harmony over the holidays. After all, if game theory was able to help avert nuclear apocalypse during the cold war, there’s an outside chance it could get your lazy uncle to help for once.
Who will host?
The solution to this problem may appear simple. In the lead-up to the holidays, have everyone vote: Grandma’s house or Aunt Laurel’s. (You’ll have to draw straws for who gives Grandma the bad news.)
But what if there are three choices? Game theorists say you should use a Borda count. Each person ranks their preferences: 1, 2, 3. Then you add up the numbers. The host with the lowest score wins. Variants of the Borda count are used in some national elections – and even important international matters such as selecting the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Who conducts the Borda count is another question. Maybe break out the straws again?
Who brings what?
That greasy green bean casserole gets thunked down on the table every year – your cousin’s contribution to the festive feast. Many people have delicious alternatives they would love to provide, but no one wants to hurt her feelings, so those woeful wilted beans keep coming back. How can you break free from this pattern without being insulting?
People expect others to behave consistently when they encounter the same situation. But whether a situation is considered the same or different can depend on how it is presented. In game theory, this is known as framing, and it can cause people to radically alter their behaviour. When told something is a business interaction, for instance, people behave more selfishly; if told the exact same interaction is social, they are more altruistic.
So switch frames. Seize on a change of time or venue. “Since we’re at Dad’s house this year, let’s change dishes.”
The last bit of dessert
If your family members aren’t arguing about politics, they’re probably squabbling over who gets the last roast potatoes or the final sliver of Stilton. How can you keep the bickering to a minimum? Game theorists recommend using I Cut, You Pick. If there are two people hankering after the last of the yule log, one slices and the other chooses.
Or, if you’re facing your first holiday after a marital separation, you might use the same technique to peaceably allocate the living room furniture, the still unused china and the fondue set. When the person doing the dividing is motivated to make the portions equally good, it’s more likely that both parties will end up satisfied. And that applies whether it’s cake or crystal.
Too much food?
It’s always the same: every year you’re begging people to take home leftovers. Everyone brings way too much food. Why? Look at their incentives. There’s no real penalty for bringing an excessive amount, but somebody might be offended if they bring too little. So change the incentives.
It works. In 2002, Ireland brought in a 15 cent tax on plastic grocery bags. Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped by 94 per cent. In England, it is down about 80 per cent since a plastic bag fee was introduced in October 2015.
How can you harness the power of incentives to reduce the extra food? Give a prize to the cook whose dish is totally gone, or make the guest with the most leftovers host next time. Now it’s not a measure of one’s love, it’s a game.
Morgan Schweitzer
Stop playing tag in the living room!
The kids are misbehaving after dinner. Mum yells, “If you don’t stop, we’re leaving!” They ignore her, and minutes later the antique lamp is in pieces. Why didn’t the children listen? They knew an overstuffed Mum didn’t really want to leave. Her warning was a non-credible threat.
The principle is the same when far more is at stake. One argument for holding nuclear weapons is to deter other countries from using theirs. But what if the other country strikes first? You can’t retaliate if you’ve been wiped out. To maintain a credible threat, the UK has “letters of last resort” aboard its four nuclear submarines: instructions for what to do in that situation. Since enemies don’t know where the subs are, or what the instructions say, the danger of retaliation is real.
For Mum though, it might be enough to threaten to make the kids do the dishes. If they know she is more than happy to follow through, it’s more likely to have an impact.
Uncle Larry never helps
Everyone else is busy straightening up the house, but Uncle Larry is on the couch playing Candy Crush. How can you make him do his fair share? It’s no use telling him that everyone thinks he should help. People pay more attention to empirical expectations, what others do, than normative expectations, what others say they should do.
In an experiment where people had a sum of money they could share with others, telling them that “most people donate” encouraged more giving than telling them “other people think you ought to donate”.
You can put empirical expectations to work with Larry. Make a point of having someone clean up around him, so he can see them doing it. He might just feel obliged to pitch in.
Game time
You are about to put your feet up when you sense an argument brewing over whether to play charades or put on Elf for the umpteenth time. What to do? Use an auction. Those in the opposing camps can bargain by offering to do chores. Whoever makes the best offer – finish washing the dishes and tidy up the kitchen – gets to pick.
“It’s no use telling someone to help – people pay attention to what others do, not what they say”
Game theorists recommend auctions for everything from hawking old junk from the attic to selling off bands of radio frequency to broadcasters. They are the best way to figure out who really cares more.
Getting the kids to share
One final trick if all else fails: the ultimatum game. Two kids get a small box of chocolates to share. How do they divvy them up? Ask Sally to keep some for herself and offer the rest to Richard. But add a consequence. If Richard thinks she’s being unfair, you will step in, divide the chocolates and take a few for yourself. That’s a credible threat, because they know you like chocolate.
A similar scenario applies in trade union negotiations or international trade deals. If the terms aren’t fair enough for everyone, they all lose out on the benefits of striking a deal.
Experiments show that people will reject a financial offer, despite losing money in the process, if they think they are getting a raw deal. Even when it comes at our own expense, we all take pleasure in punishing someone who is acting unfairly.
This article appeared in print under the headline “How to win at Christmas”
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In ancient Egypt, royals and subjects alike played a board game called SenetGranger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
A FEW years ago, while excavating the 5000-year-old burial mound of Basur Hoyuk in south-east Turkey, archaeologists unearthed a collection of 49 tiny stone figures: pigs, dogs, pyramids and pillars, all elaborately carved and painted. They look a lot like pieces from a board game, and three years on the researchers who found them are still trying to figure out how to play.
That might turn out to be a quixotic quest. Only in a few cases have we been able to reconstruct the rules of ancient board games, giving us insights into the lives of people who played them. We do know that humans have been shuffling pieces around boards for thousands of years, perhaps even from the dawn of civilisation. So what is it about board games that has made them a constant companion? And what does that tell us about ourselves?
Ancient board games
One reason the pieces from Basur Hoyuk remain a mystery is that no board has been discovered. We know more about Senet, played by the Egyptians as early as 5500 years ago, thanks to boards excavated from various tombs – including Tutankhamun’s – and religious texts that refer indirectly to the game. It consisted of 30 squares arranged in three rows, over which two players, using casting sticks as dice, raced to get their pieces to the end. In doing so, they appear to have used blocking strategies reminiscent of backgammon.Advertisement
According to Peter Piccione at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, Senet reveals how ancient Egyptians thought about the afterlife. Over its 3000-year reign as Egypt’s favourite game, Senet became increasingly bound up with religion. On later boards each square represented different stages on the journey into the afterlife, suggesting the game was a ritual activity, perhaps performed by one person, as well as a recreational one played by two. And Piccione argues that the way Senet was played shows that Egyptians felt they could influence the judgement of their souls when they were still alive.
The rules for the Royal Game of Ur, also known as the Game of Twenty Squares, are now pretty well established. A favourite of the Mesopotamians as early as 4500 years ago, it was rediscovered in the 1920s with the excavation of boards in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, a Sumerian city-state in what is now southern Iraq. But it wasn’t until 1979 that anyone had a clue about how to play.
That was the year Irving Finkel – an expert in the ancient Mesopotamian language of cuneiform – took up a post at the British Museum in London. When he dived into the museum’s collection of stone tablets, one stood out. Its unusual combination of writing and a grid-like diagram had everyone puzzled, until Finkel realised it contained an explicit set of rules for the Royal Game of Ur – “by far the oldest set of rules for a game,” he says.
In the game, there are spots that grant you another turn but also hazardous spaces. There is no obvious religious meaning, though we have found boards in the shape of an animal liver, which suggest a connection with hepatoscopy, or divination through examination of the liver. Indeed, Finkel says it is hard to know what the game says about ancient Mesopotamians. The only thing we know for sure is that it spread widely: boards have been dug up in Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Cyprus and Crete.
Social climbers
The context in which ancient board games were played can also be revealing. Walter Crist at Arizona State University in Phoenix has studied ancient board games discovered in Cyprus. Here, the boards for Senet and a game called Mehen were carved into stone or laid down as heavy slabs.
To work out what purpose they played in society, Crist plotted the locations and dates of the boards and found that the places where games were played changed over time. As ancient Cypriot society slowly moved from an egalitarian state to one with social hierarchies, its people went from playing in small enclosed spaces to competing in open public areas, often where feasts would have occurred.
Boards for Senet (above) and the Royal game of Ur (below) have turned up in tombsEgyptian National Museum, Cairo, Egypt/Bridgeman Images
Crist thinks that this shift reflects a new role for board games in which people tried to gain prestige by using them to interact with those above them in the social order, or even visitors from far-flung lands. “If you have two groups of people who want to interact but don’t even speak each other’s language, board games are a very good way of making that happen,” says Alex de Voogt at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who worked with Crist on the Cyprus study.
In that sense, board games probably served a similar purpose to feasting: they got people who would otherwise not interact to sit at a table together. “You get very close to somebody, just across a board,” says Crist. What’s more, if we assume they were fun, ancient board games probably gave people a chance to escape everyday cultural rules and act in ways that were not otherwise socially acceptable.
Risma Archivo/Alamy Stock Photo
Games may have been greasing the wheels of social interaction since civilisation took root in the Neolithic. Archaeologists have identified carved stone slabs in Jordan from around 7000 BC as primitive forms of a counting game called mancala, although not everyone is convinced. One recent study suggested that the rows of circular depressions in question may have been for making fire. But Crist is in no doubt. “I’m certain that games go back much earlier than we have evidence for,” he says. Even today people play games on boards scratched into the dirt, leaving no trace.
What, then, is so special about board games? Unlike pots, flints or wheels, they have no practical function, so what explains their enduring appeal? Crist thinks it has to do with our uniquely human ability to engage with one another in shared attention of something. Unlike most other species, when we interact with that thing, we have the mental capacity to realise the other person is interacting as well and yet has different goals and viewpoints. “Board games offer a tool for focusing this attention,” says Crist.
Finkel has a similar theory. He thinks board games tap into a need to compete and test ourselves against others in a safe and abstract way. Then again, he says, “the simplest idea is that board games are a distraction from the mundane, a way to fill time”.
Ultimately, there are no easy answers. Sometimes, as with the carved stone pieces found in Turkey, it’s hard to know if they really were games or symbols of prestige. It’s even more difficult to say why ancient people played, says de Voogt. “But we speculate the hell out of it.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “When the die was cast”
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By Kate Douglas
You can read this premium archive article for free as part of New Scientist’s 2022 advent calendar. To enjoy this and other festive gems, sign-up to become a registered reader for free.
WHATEVER you’re celebrating, the holidays are a good excuse to eat, drink and make merry. Flatulence is one of the most immediate consequences of overindulging and a perennial topic of mirth. But it also raises genuine questions that you’re probably too embarrassed to ask. We’re here to help.
Are some foods fartier than others?
Beans are not the only musical foods: flatus happens when we eat any complex carbohydrates. They are abundant in beans and pulses, but are also found in fruit and vegetables, dairy products, meat, alcoholic beverages and other goodies (yes, that’s practically everything – the list of foods that can reduce your toots is short and filled with caveats).Advertisement
“Joseph Pojul made a career entertaining theatregoers with his fartistry”
These compounds cannot be broken down in the small intestine, where most foods are digested, so pass unadulterated into the colon. Here, they are set upon by some 2 kilograms of bacteria, including the deceptively cuddly sounding Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes, which ferment the recalcitrant foodstuffs. The inevitable by-product is gas.
Gut microbes are particularly perky when you indulge in festive meals, largely due to the glut of carbohydrates. However, turkey with all the trimmings packs a double punch. Brussels sprouts, onions, dried fruit, red wine and the bird all contain sulphates, which are the key component of the most noxious intestinal gases.
How much wind is normal?
This is a tough one because you have to rely on honest answers. Studies asking volunteers to monitor their own emissions suggest 10 to 20 toots a day is normal. However, Terry Bolin at the University of New South Wales, Australia, found that men let rip an average of 12 times a day to women’s seven – which may result from a female tendency to suppress emissions.
In keeping with such wide variations, other research indicates that healthy people pass between 0.4 and 2.5 litres of gas daily. Not all of this is food-induced, though. About half the total volume derives from swallowed gases. Still, what you eat makes a huge difference, so much so that regular punters given a “flatulogenic diet” have been found to produce two-and-a-half times as much gas “per anus” as they do on their normal diet.
What’s in a fart?
Even the untrained nose can ascertain that the composition of flatus is highly variable. The percentage of swallowed gas can be far higher for people with ill-fitting dentures or an addiction to fizzy drinks. These gases are mainly nitrogen and oxygen. The remainder, produced by gut bacteria, is mostly hydrogen, along with carbon dioxide and methane.
So what makes the stink?
As in any perfume, the aroma comes from tiny quantities of pungent molecules. Flatulence guru Michael Levitt at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, has traced its noxiousness to three sulphurous gases, which together account for less than 1 part in 10,000 of an expulsion of wind. With help from two stalwart “odour judges”, he discovered that a fart’s potency derives from hydrogen sulphide, the “rotten-egg” gas. The overall bouquet, however, depends on how this intermingles with two other main culprits: methanethiol, which smells of “decomposing vegetables”, and the “sweet” odour of dimethyl sulphide.
Are silent ones deadlier?
Although sometimes described as a “bottom burp”, a fart is more like a whistle. The greater the volume and pressure of air passing through your rear, the louder the noise. This “instrument” has been played to considerable effect by professional trumpers, most notably the Frenchman “Le Pétomane”, aka Joseph Pojul, who from 1887 made a career entertaining theatregoers with his fartistry. Pojul had taught himself to suck up air through his anus and expel it under pressure to create farts that were thunderous but fairly innocuous.
By contrast, low volume and pressure give rise to a more discreet trump. But is it more noxious? Perhaps. Levitt found that women’s flatus contained significantly more pungent hydrogen sulphide than men’s, and his judges rated it as smellier.
Women also tend to produce less flatus than men, perhaps because of suppression – suggesting they are also more likely to control the pressure of their emissions to avoid drawing attention. This logic hints that a fart’s bark may indeed be inversely correlated with its bite.
Are farts really flammable?
Some people’s are. Glenn Gibson, who builds working models of the human colon at the University of Reading, UK, says all farters fall into one of two groups, “smelly” or “inflammable”. About a third of us are in the latter camp, with methane-producing bacteria in our bowels acquired from our mothers.
Methane, otherwise known as natural gas, is odourless and highly combustible. In fact, at concentrations above 4 or 5 per cent, it is explosive, so it’s fortunate that the act of passing wind mixes it with air, diluting the methane to safe levels. Place a match close enough to the source, however, and the seemingly innocuous flatus of an “inflammable” can be made to ignite.
Is it better out than in?
Every day, your gut generates a whopping 20 litres or more of gas. But most of this is not destined to become flatus: almost all of it is either recycled by the bacteria in your colon or absorbed into your body and exhaled in your breath.
For the bit that remains, there is evidence that smelly hydrogen sulphide prevents inflammation of the gut lining, maybe reducing your risk of bowel disease and cancer. So perhaps it might actually be good to hold that fart in. Gibson is sceptical, however. “Hydrogen sulphide is as toxic as cyanide,” he says. “Get rid of it.”
What’s to be done?
Well, there are products that contain the same enzymes used by the bacteria in your colon. Take one with your festive lunch and it will get to work straight away, breaking down the complex carbohydrates into simpler sugars that are more easily digested in the small intestine.
If it’s not wind but the nasty niffs that bother you, Levitt has found that bismuth can help, and there are stomach-remedy products available that contain it. However, a daily dose is not recommended because they can irritate the gut. And stay away from those charcoal knickers advertised on international flights: for all their promise, they’re full of hot air.
In any case, the experts agree that for most of us, flatus is nothing to worry about – a “blessing in disguise” that indicates you have healthy gut bacteria. Besides, is there a better butt for a joke than a fart?
(Image: Modern Toss)
This article appeared in print under the headline “Clearing the air”
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