The Not Old - Better Show | Growing Up in the Ice Age: Smithsonian Associate Dr. April Nowell

Description

Welcome to The Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast. I’m Paul Vogelzang, and today we have an extraordinary episode for you. We’ll be speaking with Smithsonian Associate Dr. April Nowell, a distinguished Paleolithic archaeologist and professor of anthropology, whose groundbreaking work is giving a voice to a forgotten and overlooked population from the Ice Age—children.

In prehistoric societies, children made up nearly half of the population, but until recently, their roles in the ancient world have been largely invisible. When we think of our Ice Age ancestors, we tend to imagine adults—hunting, gathering, crafting tools, and creating art. But what about the infants, toddlers, and adolescents living alongside them? Dr. Nowell’s research challenges us to reframe how we understand the past.

Link for details about Dr. Nowell’s presentation titled: Growing Up in the Ice Age.

Dr. Nowell will take us on a journey back in time, as we learn how Ice Age children played, learned, and adapted to a challenging environment, leaving marks—literally and figuratively—that have lasted tens of thousands of years. Their contributions weren’t just crucial to their survival, but to the survival and flourishing of humanity itself. In a time when their small bones and quiet voices have long since disappeared, Dr. Nowell’s research brings these children back into focus, helping us understand how their lives shaped the culture, survival, and innovation of our species.

It’s an honor to have Dr. Nowell here today, and I’m excited to dive into her fascinating work and the compelling stories she’s uncovered about childhood in the Ice Age. So, without further ado, let’s begin our conversation with Dr. April Nowell. Welcome to the show."

My thanks to Smithsonian Associate Dr. April Nowell. Smithsonian Associate Dr. April Nowell will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates and you’ll find details in our show notes today about her upcoming presentation, titled, Growing Up in the Ice Age. My thanks to the Smithsonian team for all they do for the show. My thanks to executive editor Sam Heninger and my thanks to you our wonderful audience here on radio and podcast. Thanks everybody and we’ll see you next week.

Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates'interview series on radio and podcast. The show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzang.
Speaker #1
Welcome to the Not All Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and today I just think we have an extraordinary episode for you. It's one I've really enjoyed researching. I think you're going to really enjoy the work behind this. We will be speaking with Smithsonian Associate Dr. April Noel, who is a distinguished Paleolithic archaeologist and professor of anthropology whose groundbreaking work is giving a voice to a forgotten and overlooked population from the... ice age, children. I've talked a lot about this. I'm a parent. I will soon be a grandparent. But in prehistoric societies, children made up nearly half of the population. But until recently, their roles in the ancient world have been largely invisible. When we think of our ice age ancestors, we tend to imagine adults hunting, gathering, crafting tools, and creating art. But what about the infants, the toddlers, the... adolescents living right alongside them. I think you're going to enjoy Dr. April Noel's research about this and her time with us today because it challenges us to reframe how we understand the past. Smithsonian Associate Dr. April Noel will be presenting at Smithsonian Associates coming up, so please check out our show notes today for more details about Dr. Noel's presentation titled Growing Up in the Ice Age. But we have Dr. Noel. briefly today and we'll learn that through her meticulous analysis as well as the new technology that is available to archaeological specialists, archaeological finds, like the tiny fragile teeth, the playful handprints on cave walls, and the novice tools left behind by young hands, Dr. Noel will tell us about the work that she's done to unearth the rich active lives of prehistoric children. These children... didn't just observe the world around them, they contributed to their communities in profound ways, making the tools, helping gather food, even participating in early art and play that shaped their cognitive and cultural development. Really special stuff. Dr. Ronell will take us on a journey back in time as we learn how Ice Age children played, learned, and did. adapted to a challenging environment, leaving marks literally and figuratively that have lasted tens of thousands of years. Their contributions weren't just crucial to their survival, but to the survival and flourishing of humanity itself. In a time when their small bones and quiet voices have long since disappeared, Dr. Noel's research brings these children back into focus, helping us understand how their lives shape the culture of survival. and innovation of our species. Really just an amazing episode. I learned so much and it's just an honor to be talking to Dr. Noel, who will be here with us in just a moment. I'm excited to dive into her fascinating work and the compelling stories she's uncovered about childhood in the Ice Age. So without further ado, let's begin our conversation with Dr. April Noel, Smithsonian Associate. Please welcome her to the show. Dr. April Noel, welcome to the program.
Speaker #2
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker #1
Thanks for joining us. I have to tell you, the subject that we're going to be talking about, you'll be presenting at Smithsonian Associates coming up. We'll put links everywhere so the audience can find this, but this is just such a fascinating subject. I hadn't really thought about children of the Ice Age. So congrats on this work, and I'm excited to just jump right into it. Of course, why don't we start and maybe just tell us briefly what you're going to be sharing with our Smithsonian Associates. audience coming up on October 9th. So just really right around the corner, give us some of the highlights. I know you'll be using Zoom that day. We're all on Zoom, but it's always nice to hear a little bit about some of the images that you might share. How will you engage our audience there?
Speaker #2
I'm so excited to be giving this talk. It's basically the culmination of about 20 years worth of my research. So it's going to cover. why we haven't studied children in the past before. Then we're going to look a little bit at the biological evidence we have for them, but really going to focus in on the archaeological evidence, all the stuff that we know about them culturally, the art they created, the stone tools they made, and so on. And then we're going to wrap up and say, well, hey, you know, clearly there's a lot of evidence for them, and we know why they weren't studied before, but why should we be studying kids? And I'm going to make the argument that kids are really, in fact, key to our human cultural evolution.
Speaker #1
Thank you for that. Yeah, I really got that from my research of you that they really offer kind of this window into who we are and how we treat each other and treat them. What led you to be so interested in this subject? Because it's a really unique one.
Speaker #2
Honestly, I think it was my own kids when they were little. I started with the evolution of play behavior. And I remember taking my laptop. to the beach with my kids and instead of playing I was writing about them.
Speaker #1
Good.
Speaker #2
Not the best parenting choice but it was super inspirational.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #2
And then as my kids have gotten older there and when they were in their teenagehood and all of a sudden I had my kitchen filled with these fabulous humans eating me out of house and home and so on. I started to think about even teenagers in the ice age and that's what my most recent research has been on. So really my kids have been the inspiration throughout.
Speaker #1
Yeah, my wife and I are going to be welcoming our first grandchild into our home next month. Thank you. So kids are on our minds and And I do think this is such a special topic for our audience because so many of us are part of families where kids are doing some really unique things. And you found that these kids, the research shows that they were doing some unique things. Maybe share some examples of some of the things that you found that proved that there are tools involved. There's effort. There's some thought behind some of the activities. I just thought that was fascinating to read.
Speaker #2
Yeah, absolutely. So I think normally when we think about our Ice Age past, we think about adults who are hunting or making art or gathering plant foods and so on. And we tend to forget that children were anywhere from half to two thirds of the population at that time. And so all the adults there would have had to make room for the children around them, you know, emotionally, cognitively and so on. because these adults are also aunts, uncles, moms, dads, the whole thing. And so once we change our mindset and realize that there were kids everywhere, we start to ask more interesting questions of the archaeological record. And then when we start to ask those questions, we start to find some really interesting answers. So we can see in the stone tools evidence for kids learning. So apprenticeship, when we look at the art, we see tiny handprints and tiny drawings made with tiny fingers. When we look for their burials, we not only see information about the deaths of these children, but we actually see things about their lives, how much people cared for them. We also have thousands of footprints in the Ice Age and a large... percentage of those belong to kids. Because think about your own kids. When you're going for a walk somewhere, children never take the path most traveled. They go in their own directions. And so their footprints tend to not get obliterated by later foot traffic. So we find all this literal evidence of the movements of children and we can see them running around and playing and throwing clay pellets at each other. And things like that, some of them hit the stalactites and others, you know, hit the ground. So really through a combination of new technologies, as well as sort of a new mental framework, I think we can, we've really found out so much about the lives of these children and we can see it's so much richer than we had expected.
Speaker #1
It was very clear to me too, in my research of you and your work that you approach this very lovingly. And that came through in many areas of the research that I did on you. But one in particular was a dig site that you managed in France, where a child's burial was unearthed along with some beadwork. And I wonder if you'd describe that just a bit, because I thought it was very touching. I thought to read that because it really is a window into who we are perhaps as people and how we want to treat a generation that's coming up. and how we want to honor them.
Speaker #2
Yeah, I think when people think about life during the Ice Age, they have this impression that it was incredibly hard and that people were only interested in the next meal or, you know, that's all they had time to focus on. And that life was, I don't want to say cheap, but, you know, children died all the time and, you know, and so on and so forth. And from my research, that's not what I see. I see people had... time for art and all kinds of other things beyond just, you know, the thought of the next meal. And I've also found that, as I would expect, that people love their children. And when they pass, they felt deep grief for them. And that the site that you're talking about is this wonderful site in France, where we have a child who's maybe between two or four years old, something like that. And We don't know the gender of the child, so I'll say they, but so they are buried with all of these dentallium beads. Dentallium is a shell that's kind of cylindrical. And what we know is that people collected these shells, specifically the tinier ones, and then cut them so that they made really tiny standardized beads. Then they took these beads and embroidered them on the clothing of this child. And so if you think about the amount of time it took to collect... the shells, to make them into beads, to create the thread and then embroider them onto the clothing, which itself took lots of time. It's a great deal of investment. And what's interesting is that we see during this time that beads made for children are about two-thirds the size of those made for adults. So they're specially made for kids. They're not just... you know, handed down old ones from adults. And so, all of that time and all of that effort that went into that clothing was then buried with that child. It was taken out of circulation. It wasn't passed on to someone else, but it was actually something to maybe keep the child warm or to remind them of the care of their community. And so, to me, those kinds of gestures are things that just really speak to how much grief and how much loss the community felt when this little one passed away too soon.
Speaker #1
Very sweet.
Speaker #2
Can I tell you about one other one that I love so much?
Speaker #1
Please, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker #2
So the other one, so that one tugs in my heart, but another one that really, that kind of makes me teary when I think about it. So there's a young man, he's about 17, who has dwarfism. He's the oldest example of someone with dwarfism that we know, and he's from a site in Southern Italy called Romito. And this young man would have had some difficulty keeping up. with his peers and hunting and because he had a number of different physical challenges. And yet we can see from a study of his remains that he ate the same meat-rich diet as the rest of his community and that he was strong and he was, you know, we can tell that he was participating as best he could in different activities and contributing to the community and so on. But what really gets me is that when he passed away, he was buried in the arms of an older woman that we think, based on the skeletal similarities, we think is probably his mom. And so this idea that the community, because it's the community who decides how to bury people, obviously, wrapped her arms around him. And so it just makes me think that they recognize the relationship between these two people, and that maybe that relationship would continue beyond their deaths. To me, it's just such a beautiful gesture on the part of the community.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it's really an example of mothering. And it doesn't matter dates and history. Mothering is present forever. And that's beautiful.
Speaker #2
Absolutely.
Speaker #1
Thank you for sharing that. Hi, it's Paul. Do you love entertaining, informative, eclectic, insightful programs about culture, health, science, life, and everything Smithsonian? As part of our Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast, we're introducing you to the new Smithsonian Associates streaming series. Smithsonian, a nonprofit organization, is excited to present this new aspect of their 55 years as the world's largest museum-based educational program. Join us from the comfort of your home as we periodically interview Smithsonian Associate guest speakers. Our audience here on radio and podcast can explore our website for more information links. and details at notold-better.com. Thanks, everybody. Our guest is Dr. April Knoll. Dr. Knoll will be presenting at Smithsonian Associates coming up. We'll have links in our show notes today so that our audience can find out more about Dr. Knoll and her wonderful research. She's taking us on a journey today and she'll be taking us on a journey on October 9th. Please check out the show notes today for the links to Smithsonian Associates, but we're learning all about children of the Ice Age. One of the things I learned too in my research, Dr. Knoll, is how play was... so important, not just to the development of the child, but also in survival. And I thought that that was an interesting way for me to look at this, that it's all well and good for us to parent, but in terms of making certain that the next generation follow, we need to teach some survival skills to it. It appears that through play, the children were learning some of that. So maybe tell us a little bit about what research led you to that conclusion.
Speaker #2
This is something that we see not only in humans or in primates, but even mammals more broadly, that the littlest ones are learning about their environment, how to engage with others in their group, how to, in the case of some primates, use tools and so on, all through play. And so humans are no exception. We've just taken it to a new height. For example, When it comes to making something like ceramics, we have ceramics dating back 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. My colleagues and I just published a new paper on this showing how children 25,000 years ago were learning how to make ceramics. And we can see that with their fingerprints and the kinds of errors they make and so on. But you can just imagine, again, with your own kids, how they would learn to make ceramics by beginning by playing with the clay that would be around them. or helping to, you know, kids always want to help out. So they could collect the firewood for the kiln, or they could collect the clay or do all kinds of things like that, and then gradually be brought into the center of what we call a community of practice. So a community of people making, in this case, ceramics, but it would be the same for stone tools. And so in just the same way that kids today are these little sponges, and they absorb, you know, everything around them, kids back then would have through play learn the properties. and, you know, the possibilities, the limits, the challenges of the materials they were working with. So be it clay or be it stone. And just by watching the elders around them, they would have learned how to make these objects and how to use them properly. And, you know, you can imagine when you're growing up in that time period. everyone has to, for example, learn how to make stone tools. Stone tools are not just for hunting, but they're for processing plants. They could be for making cordage or cutting cords and so on. So a good sharp stone tool is like a Swiss army knife today. It would be good for just about everything. So everyone would have to learn that right from the beginning and kids just naturally make work into play.
Speaker #1
How has the technology influenced your work? Because so much of technology changes so rapidly today. And I'm sure in your career and in your professional life, you've probably seen it really run the gamut. What are you using today to kind of help you unearth, literally unearth some of these wonderful stories?
Speaker #2
Things are changing so rapidly. So, for example, people are doing much more with ancient DNA right now. We can learn about relationships between people and between different... group through a study of their genetics. We can also understand more about the sex of these kids because it's very difficult to determine sex in sub-adult skeletons because especially before puberty, girls and boys look really similar. So by doing some ancient DNA, we can get more information about sex and then we can kind of look at issues of gender. How does gender map to sex, for example, and we can also look at reasons why. If kids had certain kinds of congenital diseases or all sorts of things like that, we can see that through a study of the genetics as well. So that's just opening up a huge area of research for us. And then other things, for example, the way when I was talking about footprints, we can use all kinds of new techniques to scan the footprints and we can get. better understanding of how quickly people were moving. And so when I'm talking about them running or playing, I can actually use almost a forensic approach to studying these footprints to really get a sense of how people were moving through space. And the same thing with looking at handprints in cave art and all sorts of things like that. We're just bringing all kinds of new technologies to record this information, to analyze this information. And honestly, every couple of weeks, we find something new. I published a book in 2021, Growing Up in the Ice Age, which was sort of a summary of what I knew at that point. And of course, the minute you send it off to the publisher, and you're like, well, that's done. You know, people start sending you emails. Oh, did you see the news item of the child that was found? Or the oldest animal ever found? It was of a kid.
Speaker #1
Right. Right.
Speaker #2
There's always all these new discoveries as well. And so as people continue to do research, so it's such an evolving, and this time I'll say pardon the pun, but it is an evolving field. So that's what makes it super exciting. And I'm already, I've got an electronic file called, you know, second edition where I'm just throwing all this new stuff into it. It's just super exciting.
Speaker #1
Wonderful. Well, selfishly, we'll have you back. Yeah, just what a wonderful subject. Well, tell us a little bit about... storytelling. Did you actually see some storytelling make some growth or some improvements over the course of your work on children? Did you see that the storytelling maybe became more sophisticated or you were able to gather more information from the storytelling? Because you talk a little bit about those tiny handprints and that just brings to mind such a visual. And I wonder how those stories were kind of represented in the cave art.
Speaker #2
Yeah, this is a new area of research for me that I'm just really starting to explore now. I think for a long time, anthropologists had this idea that in hunter-gatherer societies, they didn't have the same, what we would call direct pedagogy as we have in, say, Western industrialized societies today, where you have a teacher in a classroom, and the teacher is imparting knowledge. students are taking notes or whatever. And that kind of way of learning doesn't exist, say, in forager or hunter-gatherer societies, that they have a different way of teaching. And then I started to read the literature about it and realized that actually they have very similar kinds of teaching, but it happens through storytelling. So you have a teacher who is like an expert knowledge holder who identifies what we call naive learners, so people who need to learn these things, these stories. And then they start to impart this knowledge. And they're these wonderful stories. But when you look at the details of the story that beyond just the plot themselves, they tell you all kinds of things about where to go during a drought, how to find certain kinds of foods, how to hunt, how to treat your in-laws. Important things, you know.
Speaker #1
I can understand that. Always.
Speaker #2
You know, things about. taboos and all kinds of stuff like that. So you see that these stories are actually a vehicle for transmitting all kinds of information. And I don't know if you remember, or I'm sure you remember quite a few years ago when there was a tsunami in Indonesia and a terrible thing, but more people survived than would be expected. I mean, relatively speaking, few people perished in that. And when people asked... the survivors, well, how did you survive? How did you know what to do? The response was basically, well, it's not like we'd ever experienced a tsunami before. These events are super rare. But we remembered the stories of our parents and our grandparents about what to do during a tsunami. It was just ingrained in us. And so when this was happening, all of a sudden, that survival knowledge just kicked in. And so that's always been in my mind. And so when we put this back into time, into... into the Pleistocene, into the Ice Age, we don't have the direct stories, obviously, you know, we don't have any written language or anything like that. So that chain of storytelling has been broken. But what I've started to do is to look at the cave art itself and to say, well, do we have evidence for narrative in there? What kinds of stories are we seeing in the art? And again, there's this idea that the art is just random assortments of like a mammoth or a horse or whatever. But in fact, once you start looking at it, you see so many scenes of animals interacting or animals in motion. There's all kinds of effort that's been put into creating three-dimensionality from two-dimensional images and even four-dimensionality, if I can call motion or movement a fourth dimension. And it's spectacular. If you think about the kinds of sources of light they had, fire, torches, and these... gorgeous stone lamps, the flickering of that light plays into the techniques that they've used to suggest motion. For example, there's a bison that has eight legs, but if you look at it, they're perfectly patterned, like four and four for different parts of that locomotion. And if you flicker the light, it looks like it's in motion, you know? And so for me, that is so perfectly part of storytelling. And again, if we look to the ethnographic record, people often are using drawing in the sand or in the snow or creating rock art or using objects to illustrate those stories. And so I think that's what we have that kind of tradition, but going back thousands and thousands of years, and the whole purpose of it is, I think, to transmit this really important survival information, but maybe to be entertaining at the same time.
Speaker #1
Well, thank you. This has just been so entertaining for me and such an eye-opening subject. Dr. April Noel has been our guest today. Dr. Noel is a Smithsonian Associates, will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up on October 9th. We'll have lots of details about Dr. Noel in this wonderful presentation titled Growing Up in the Ice Age. As I say, please come back. We'd love to hear more from you about this subject as you do more research, but grateful to have you today. Thanks for being so generous with your time. We'll be following up, Dr. Noel, but... congratulations on this wonderful work.
Speaker #2
Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me. And it was super fun. And I'd love to come back anytime. And I hope I see a lot of, virtually see a lot of your listeners in October.
Speaker #1
My thanks to Smithsonian Associate Dr. April Noel. Smithsonian Associate Dr. April Noel will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates. You'll find details in our show notes today about her upcoming presentation titled Growing Up in the Ice Age. My thanks to the Smithsonian team for all they do to support the show. My thanks to executive editor Sam Hanegar. My thanks to you, our wonderful audience here on radio and podcast. Please be well, be safe. Let's talk about better. The not old Better Show. Thanks, everybody. We will see you next week.
Speaker #0
Thanks for joining us this week on the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast. To find out more about all of today's stories or to view our extensive back catalog of previous shows, simply visit notold-better.com. Join us again next time as we deep dive into some of the most fascinating real life stories from across the world, all focused on this wonderful experience of getting better. not just older. Let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show.
Speaker #1
Hi, one final thing. Please check out our website for this episode and all episodes at notold-better.com or subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and be sure to check out your local radio stations to find out more about the Not Old Better Show on podcast and radio. You can find us all over social media. Our Twitter feed is Not Old Better and we're on Instagram at Not Old Better too. The Not Old Better Show is a production. of NOBS Studios. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and I hope you'll join me again next time to talk about better. The Not Old Better Show. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.

Description

Link for details about Dr. Nowell’s presentation titled: Growing Up in the Ice Age.

Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates'interview series on radio and podcast. The show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzang.
Speaker #1
Welcome to the Not All Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and today I just think we have an extraordinary episode for you. It's one I've really enjoyed researching. I think you're going to really enjoy the work behind this. We will be speaking with Smithsonian Associate Dr. April Noel, who is a distinguished Paleolithic archaeologist and professor of anthropology whose groundbreaking work is giving a voice to a forgotten and overlooked population from the... ice age, children. I've talked a lot about this. I'm a parent. I will soon be a grandparent. But in prehistoric societies, children made up nearly half of the population. But until recently, their roles in the ancient world have been largely invisible. When we think of our ice age ancestors, we tend to imagine adults hunting, gathering, crafting tools, and creating art. But what about the infants, the toddlers, the... adolescents living right alongside them. I think you're going to enjoy Dr. April Noel's research about this and her time with us today because it challenges us to reframe how we understand the past. Smithsonian Associate Dr. April Noel will be presenting at Smithsonian Associates coming up, so please check out our show notes today for more details about Dr. Noel's presentation titled Growing Up in the Ice Age. But we have Dr. Noel. briefly today and we'll learn that through her meticulous analysis as well as the new technology that is available to archaeological specialists, archaeological finds, like the tiny fragile teeth, the playful handprints on cave walls, and the novice tools left behind by young hands, Dr. Noel will tell us about the work that she's done to unearth the rich active lives of prehistoric children. These children... didn't just observe the world around them, they contributed to their communities in profound ways, making the tools, helping gather food, even participating in early art and play that shaped their cognitive and cultural development. Really special stuff. Dr. Ronell will take us on a journey back in time as we learn how Ice Age children played, learned, and did. adapted to a challenging environment, leaving marks literally and figuratively that have lasted tens of thousands of years. Their contributions weren't just crucial to their survival, but to the survival and flourishing of humanity itself. In a time when their small bones and quiet voices have long since disappeared, Dr. Noel's research brings these children back into focus, helping us understand how their lives shape the culture of survival. and innovation of our species. Really just an amazing episode. I learned so much and it's just an honor to be talking to Dr. Noel, who will be here with us in just a moment. I'm excited to dive into her fascinating work and the compelling stories she's uncovered about childhood in the Ice Age. So without further ado, let's begin our conversation with Dr. April Noel, Smithsonian Associate. Please welcome her to the show. Dr. April Noel, welcome to the program.
Speaker #2
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker #1
Thanks for joining us. I have to tell you, the subject that we're going to be talking about, you'll be presenting at Smithsonian Associates coming up. We'll put links everywhere so the audience can find this, but this is just such a fascinating subject. I hadn't really thought about children of the Ice Age. So congrats on this work, and I'm excited to just jump right into it. Of course, why don't we start and maybe just tell us briefly what you're going to be sharing with our Smithsonian Associates. audience coming up on October 9th. So just really right around the corner, give us some of the highlights. I know you'll be using Zoom that day. We're all on Zoom, but it's always nice to hear a little bit about some of the images that you might share. How will you engage our audience there?
Speaker #2
I'm so excited to be giving this talk. It's basically the culmination of about 20 years worth of my research. So it's going to cover. why we haven't studied children in the past before. Then we're going to look a little bit at the biological evidence we have for them, but really going to focus in on the archaeological evidence, all the stuff that we know about them culturally, the art they created, the stone tools they made, and so on. And then we're going to wrap up and say, well, hey, you know, clearly there's a lot of evidence for them, and we know why they weren't studied before, but why should we be studying kids? And I'm going to make the argument that kids are really, in fact, key to our human cultural evolution.
Speaker #1
Thank you for that. Yeah, I really got that from my research of you that they really offer kind of this window into who we are and how we treat each other and treat them. What led you to be so interested in this subject? Because it's a really unique one.
Speaker #2
Honestly, I think it was my own kids when they were little. I started with the evolution of play behavior. And I remember taking my laptop. to the beach with my kids and instead of playing I was writing about them.
Speaker #1
Good.
Speaker #2
Not the best parenting choice but it was super inspirational.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #2
And then as my kids have gotten older there and when they were in their teenagehood and all of a sudden I had my kitchen filled with these fabulous humans eating me out of house and home and so on. I started to think about even teenagers in the ice age and that's what my most recent research has been on. So really my kids have been the inspiration throughout.
Speaker #1
Yeah, my wife and I are going to be welcoming our first grandchild into our home next month. Thank you. So kids are on our minds and And I do think this is such a special topic for our audience because so many of us are part of families where kids are doing some really unique things. And you found that these kids, the research shows that they were doing some unique things. Maybe share some examples of some of the things that you found that proved that there are tools involved. There's effort. There's some thought behind some of the activities. I just thought that was fascinating to read.
Speaker #2
Yeah, absolutely. So I think normally when we think about our Ice Age past, we think about adults who are hunting or making art or gathering plant foods and so on. And we tend to forget that children were anywhere from half to two thirds of the population at that time. And so all the adults there would have had to make room for the children around them, you know, emotionally, cognitively and so on. because these adults are also aunts, uncles, moms, dads, the whole thing. And so once we change our mindset and realize that there were kids everywhere, we start to ask more interesting questions of the archaeological record. And then when we start to ask those questions, we start to find some really interesting answers. So we can see in the stone tools evidence for kids learning. So apprenticeship, when we look at the art, we see tiny handprints and tiny drawings made with tiny fingers. When we look for their burials, we not only see information about the deaths of these children, but we actually see things about their lives, how much people cared for them. We also have thousands of footprints in the Ice Age and a large... percentage of those belong to kids. Because think about your own kids. When you're going for a walk somewhere, children never take the path most traveled. They go in their own directions. And so their footprints tend to not get obliterated by later foot traffic. So we find all this literal evidence of the movements of children and we can see them running around and playing and throwing clay pellets at each other. And things like that, some of them hit the stalactites and others, you know, hit the ground. So really through a combination of new technologies, as well as sort of a new mental framework, I think we can, we've really found out so much about the lives of these children and we can see it's so much richer than we had expected.
Speaker #1
It was very clear to me too, in my research of you and your work that you approach this very lovingly. And that came through in many areas of the research that I did on you. But one in particular was a dig site that you managed in France, where a child's burial was unearthed along with some beadwork. And I wonder if you'd describe that just a bit, because I thought it was very touching. I thought to read that because it really is a window into who we are perhaps as people and how we want to treat a generation that's coming up. and how we want to honor them.
Speaker #2
Yeah, I think when people think about life during the Ice Age, they have this impression that it was incredibly hard and that people were only interested in the next meal or, you know, that's all they had time to focus on. And that life was, I don't want to say cheap, but, you know, children died all the time and, you know, and so on and so forth. And from my research, that's not what I see. I see people had... time for art and all kinds of other things beyond just, you know, the thought of the next meal. And I've also found that, as I would expect, that people love their children. And when they pass, they felt deep grief for them. And that the site that you're talking about is this wonderful site in France, where we have a child who's maybe between two or four years old, something like that. And We don't know the gender of the child, so I'll say they, but so they are buried with all of these dentallium beads. Dentallium is a shell that's kind of cylindrical. And what we know is that people collected these shells, specifically the tinier ones, and then cut them so that they made really tiny standardized beads. Then they took these beads and embroidered them on the clothing of this child. And so if you think about the amount of time it took to collect... the shells, to make them into beads, to create the thread and then embroider them onto the clothing, which itself took lots of time. It's a great deal of investment. And what's interesting is that we see during this time that beads made for children are about two-thirds the size of those made for adults. So they're specially made for kids. They're not just... you know, handed down old ones from adults. And so, all of that time and all of that effort that went into that clothing was then buried with that child. It was taken out of circulation. It wasn't passed on to someone else, but it was actually something to maybe keep the child warm or to remind them of the care of their community. And so, to me, those kinds of gestures are things that just really speak to how much grief and how much loss the community felt when this little one passed away too soon.
Speaker #1
Very sweet.
Speaker #2
Can I tell you about one other one that I love so much?
Speaker #1
Please, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker #2
So the other one, so that one tugs in my heart, but another one that really, that kind of makes me teary when I think about it. So there's a young man, he's about 17, who has dwarfism. He's the oldest example of someone with dwarfism that we know, and he's from a site in Southern Italy called Romito. And this young man would have had some difficulty keeping up. with his peers and hunting and because he had a number of different physical challenges. And yet we can see from a study of his remains that he ate the same meat-rich diet as the rest of his community and that he was strong and he was, you know, we can tell that he was participating as best he could in different activities and contributing to the community and so on. But what really gets me is that when he passed away, he was buried in the arms of an older woman that we think, based on the skeletal similarities, we think is probably his mom. And so this idea that the community, because it's the community who decides how to bury people, obviously, wrapped her arms around him. And so it just makes me think that they recognize the relationship between these two people, and that maybe that relationship would continue beyond their deaths. To me, it's just such a beautiful gesture on the part of the community.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it's really an example of mothering. And it doesn't matter dates and history. Mothering is present forever. And that's beautiful.
Speaker #2
Absolutely.
Speaker #1
Thank you for sharing that. Hi, it's Paul. Do you love entertaining, informative, eclectic, insightful programs about culture, health, science, life, and everything Smithsonian? As part of our Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast, we're introducing you to the new Smithsonian Associates streaming series. Smithsonian, a nonprofit organization, is excited to present this new aspect of their 55 years as the world's largest museum-based educational program. Join us from the comfort of your home as we periodically interview Smithsonian Associate guest speakers. Our audience here on radio and podcast can explore our website for more information links. and details at notold-better.com. Thanks, everybody. Our guest is Dr. April Knoll. Dr. Knoll will be presenting at Smithsonian Associates coming up. We'll have links in our show notes today so that our audience can find out more about Dr. Knoll and her wonderful research. She's taking us on a journey today and she'll be taking us on a journey on October 9th. Please check out the show notes today for the links to Smithsonian Associates, but we're learning all about children of the Ice Age. One of the things I learned too in my research, Dr. Knoll, is how play was... so important, not just to the development of the child, but also in survival. And I thought that that was an interesting way for me to look at this, that it's all well and good for us to parent, but in terms of making certain that the next generation follow, we need to teach some survival skills to it. It appears that through play, the children were learning some of that. So maybe tell us a little bit about what research led you to that conclusion.
Speaker #2
This is something that we see not only in humans or in primates, but even mammals more broadly, that the littlest ones are learning about their environment, how to engage with others in their group, how to, in the case of some primates, use tools and so on, all through play. And so humans are no exception. We've just taken it to a new height. For example, When it comes to making something like ceramics, we have ceramics dating back 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. My colleagues and I just published a new paper on this showing how children 25,000 years ago were learning how to make ceramics. And we can see that with their fingerprints and the kinds of errors they make and so on. But you can just imagine, again, with your own kids, how they would learn to make ceramics by beginning by playing with the clay that would be around them. or helping to, you know, kids always want to help out. So they could collect the firewood for the kiln, or they could collect the clay or do all kinds of things like that, and then gradually be brought into the center of what we call a community of practice. So a community of people making, in this case, ceramics, but it would be the same for stone tools. And so in just the same way that kids today are these little sponges, and they absorb, you know, everything around them, kids back then would have through play learn the properties. and, you know, the possibilities, the limits, the challenges of the materials they were working with. So be it clay or be it stone. And just by watching the elders around them, they would have learned how to make these objects and how to use them properly. And, you know, you can imagine when you're growing up in that time period. everyone has to, for example, learn how to make stone tools. Stone tools are not just for hunting, but they're for processing plants. They could be for making cordage or cutting cords and so on. So a good sharp stone tool is like a Swiss army knife today. It would be good for just about everything. So everyone would have to learn that right from the beginning and kids just naturally make work into play.
Speaker #1
How has the technology influenced your work? Because so much of technology changes so rapidly today. And I'm sure in your career and in your professional life, you've probably seen it really run the gamut. What are you using today to kind of help you unearth, literally unearth some of these wonderful stories?
Speaker #2
Things are changing so rapidly. So, for example, people are doing much more with ancient DNA right now. We can learn about relationships between people and between different... group through a study of their genetics. We can also understand more about the sex of these kids because it's very difficult to determine sex in sub-adult skeletons because especially before puberty, girls and boys look really similar. So by doing some ancient DNA, we can get more information about sex and then we can kind of look at issues of gender. How does gender map to sex, for example, and we can also look at reasons why. If kids had certain kinds of congenital diseases or all sorts of things like that, we can see that through a study of the genetics as well. So that's just opening up a huge area of research for us. And then other things, for example, the way when I was talking about footprints, we can use all kinds of new techniques to scan the footprints and we can get. better understanding of how quickly people were moving. And so when I'm talking about them running or playing, I can actually use almost a forensic approach to studying these footprints to really get a sense of how people were moving through space. And the same thing with looking at handprints in cave art and all sorts of things like that. We're just bringing all kinds of new technologies to record this information, to analyze this information. And honestly, every couple of weeks, we find something new. I published a book in 2021, Growing Up in the Ice Age, which was sort of a summary of what I knew at that point. And of course, the minute you send it off to the publisher, and you're like, well, that's done. You know, people start sending you emails. Oh, did you see the news item of the child that was found? Or the oldest animal ever found? It was of a kid.
Speaker #1
Right. Right.
Speaker #2
There's always all these new discoveries as well. And so as people continue to do research, so it's such an evolving, and this time I'll say pardon the pun, but it is an evolving field. So that's what makes it super exciting. And I'm already, I've got an electronic file called, you know, second edition where I'm just throwing all this new stuff into it. It's just super exciting.
Speaker #1
Wonderful. Well, selfishly, we'll have you back. Yeah, just what a wonderful subject. Well, tell us a little bit about... storytelling. Did you actually see some storytelling make some growth or some improvements over the course of your work on children? Did you see that the storytelling maybe became more sophisticated or you were able to gather more information from the storytelling? Because you talk a little bit about those tiny handprints and that just brings to mind such a visual. And I wonder how those stories were kind of represented in the cave art.
Speaker #2
Yeah, this is a new area of research for me that I'm just really starting to explore now. I think for a long time, anthropologists had this idea that in hunter-gatherer societies, they didn't have the same, what we would call direct pedagogy as we have in, say, Western industrialized societies today, where you have a teacher in a classroom, and the teacher is imparting knowledge. students are taking notes or whatever. And that kind of way of learning doesn't exist, say, in forager or hunter-gatherer societies, that they have a different way of teaching. And then I started to read the literature about it and realized that actually they have very similar kinds of teaching, but it happens through storytelling. So you have a teacher who is like an expert knowledge holder who identifies what we call naive learners, so people who need to learn these things, these stories. And then they start to impart this knowledge. And they're these wonderful stories. But when you look at the details of the story that beyond just the plot themselves, they tell you all kinds of things about where to go during a drought, how to find certain kinds of foods, how to hunt, how to treat your in-laws. Important things, you know.
Speaker #1
I can understand that. Always.
Speaker #2
You know, things about. taboos and all kinds of stuff like that. So you see that these stories are actually a vehicle for transmitting all kinds of information. And I don't know if you remember, or I'm sure you remember quite a few years ago when there was a tsunami in Indonesia and a terrible thing, but more people survived than would be expected. I mean, relatively speaking, few people perished in that. And when people asked... the survivors, well, how did you survive? How did you know what to do? The response was basically, well, it's not like we'd ever experienced a tsunami before. These events are super rare. But we remembered the stories of our parents and our grandparents about what to do during a tsunami. It was just ingrained in us. And so when this was happening, all of a sudden, that survival knowledge just kicked in. And so that's always been in my mind. And so when we put this back into time, into... into the Pleistocene, into the Ice Age, we don't have the direct stories, obviously, you know, we don't have any written language or anything like that. So that chain of storytelling has been broken. But what I've started to do is to look at the cave art itself and to say, well, do we have evidence for narrative in there? What kinds of stories are we seeing in the art? And again, there's this idea that the art is just random assortments of like a mammoth or a horse or whatever. But in fact, once you start looking at it, you see so many scenes of animals interacting or animals in motion. There's all kinds of effort that's been put into creating three-dimensionality from two-dimensional images and even four-dimensionality, if I can call motion or movement a fourth dimension. And it's spectacular. If you think about the kinds of sources of light they had, fire, torches, and these... gorgeous stone lamps, the flickering of that light plays into the techniques that they've used to suggest motion. For example, there's a bison that has eight legs, but if you look at it, they're perfectly patterned, like four and four for different parts of that locomotion. And if you flicker the light, it looks like it's in motion, you know? And so for me, that is so perfectly part of storytelling. And again, if we look to the ethnographic record, people often are using drawing in the sand or in the snow or creating rock art or using objects to illustrate those stories. And so I think that's what we have that kind of tradition, but going back thousands and thousands of years, and the whole purpose of it is, I think, to transmit this really important survival information, but maybe to be entertaining at the same time.
Speaker #1
Well, thank you. This has just been so entertaining for me and such an eye-opening subject. Dr. April Noel has been our guest today. Dr. Noel is a Smithsonian Associates, will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates coming up on October 9th. We'll have lots of details about Dr. Noel in this wonderful presentation titled Growing Up in the Ice Age. As I say, please come back. We'd love to hear more from you about this subject as you do more research, but grateful to have you today. Thanks for being so generous with your time. We'll be following up, Dr. Noel, but... congratulations on this wonderful work.
Speaker #2
Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me. And it was super fun. And I'd love to come back anytime. And I hope I see a lot of, virtually see a lot of your listeners in October.
Speaker #1
My thanks to Smithsonian Associate Dr. April Noel. Smithsonian Associate Dr. April Noel will be appearing at Smithsonian Associates. You'll find details in our show notes today about her upcoming presentation titled Growing Up in the Ice Age. My thanks to the Smithsonian team for all they do to support the show. My thanks to executive editor Sam Hanegar. My thanks to you, our wonderful audience here on radio and podcast. Please be well, be safe. Let's talk about better. The not old Better Show. Thanks, everybody. We will see you next week.
Speaker #0
Thanks for joining us this week on the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast. To find out more about all of today's stories or to view our extensive back catalog of previous shows, simply visit notold-better.com. Join us again next time as we deep dive into some of the most fascinating real life stories from across the world, all focused on this wonderful experience of getting better. not just older. Let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show.
Speaker #1
Hi, one final thing. Please check out our website for this episode and all episodes at notold-better.com or subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and be sure to check out your local radio stations to find out more about the Not Old Better Show on podcast and radio. You can find us all over social media. Our Twitter feed is Not Old Better and we're on Instagram at Not Old Better too. The Not Old Better Show is a production. of NOBS Studios. I'm Paul Vogelsang, and I hope you'll join me again next time to talk about better. The Not Old Better Show. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.

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