Peter Gray

And he, nine years old, looked at us big adults and he said, go to hell.

Yes, so I began to get interested in how children historically have acquired the culture that they're growing up in, learning from others what you need to know to succeed in that culture eventually as an adult.

And I'm an evolutionary psychologist, so I look at human nature from the perspective of Darwinian evolution.

If you look at human nature from that perspective, you automatically become interested in hunter-gatherers because we were all hunter-gatherers during 99% or so of our biological evolution.

As you undoubtedly know, there have been hunter-gatherers in isolated parts of the world who, at least into the middle to even late 20th century, were still living in a rather pristine hunter-gatherer way of life.

There were anthropologists who had trekked out into those areas to make contact with them and study them.

I began to read what I could of such work.

And ultimately, along with a graduate student, surveyed a group of anthropologists who had studied various different groups of hunter-gatherers in different parts of the world to find out from them what are children's lives like in the culture that they observe?

What's the relationship between adults and children?

And what I found in every case, seven different cultures on three different continents, was that the

children were free to play and explore pretty much all day long.

They might be asked to do little chores, but no such thing as school.

You know, the adults might say, you know, don't eat these mushrooms, they're poisonous.

They would point out things that are dangerous.

But the assumption was that children would learn by observing, by exploring, by playing,

And when I asked the anthropologists, well, what did the children play at?

They talked about play that seemed to be, in essentially every case, modeled after the activities that were important to the culture in which they were growing up.

So in a culture where the men hunt big game, the little boys and middle-sized boys too were playing at hunting big game.

In a culture where

they used dugout canoes.