Childhood in the Congo Basin with Sheina Lew-Levy
2025-06-24 12:00:00.000 +00:00

I'm David Pinsov. And I think I'm David Petrozowski. Welcome to Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast. Where you will hear actual evolutionary psychology being done by actual evolutionary psychologists. David, good to see you. Good to see you too, Dave. I'm really excited about this guest. This this this was an amazing conversation. Uh yeah, we have uh Sheena Lou Levy, who is uh professor in the Department of Psychology at uh Durham University in the UK. And she's just done absolutely mind-blowing work. Uh she has done anthropological field work uh in a small group of foragers in the Congo Basin studying uh the evolution of childhood learning and childhood itself and child development in a culture that is quite distant from ours with child rearing practices that

are quite different from ours. Uh so if you're a parent, I think this will be particularly interesting for you. Um, I know I confronted Sheena with three Darwinian mysteries that arose in my own experiences being a dad, and I thought she uh absolutely fully solved them. She addressed them to my satisfaction right on the spot. It was really impressive. So uh sit back, relax, and uh take a nap. Well don't take a nap because well if you're a parent you might need a nap, but don't take a nap because you won't listen to what we're saying. So relax and listen. Enjoy. So Sheena Lulivi is is joining us today. Sheena, really good to see you. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, guys. Um, you are the first human behavioral ecologist that we have had on.

That's fine. Uh, and one of the things that we uh were excited to do with this uh thing we're doing is explain to people what the evolutionary social sciences are and who the people are doing it. And because you happen to be the first human behavioral ecologist on, um, well, number one, the question is, do you think of yourself that way? Yeah. And I think that's sort of many, many of the that we've only had two people on so far, and both have been um psychologists, like lab psychologists, but they've still sort of talked about the um uh their journey to discovering at least an evolutionary approach to psychology, for example. Um, so yeah, the one question is like, do you consider yourself a human behavioral

ecologist? And then uh and then related to that is like I think a natural maybe question, and I don't know this about you, um, is how you you you got into it. Oh God, that's a real story. Okay, first day, I think my I would say a big part of my training is human behavioral ecology, but when you study kids, you just need to do a little bit of everything because they just defy disciplinary categorization. So yeah, definitely a big portion of my training is in human behavioral ecology. Um, my PhD is actually in in psychology, which not a lot of people know. Um But yeah, I ended up there because I just found the right advisor for me. And I to this day have never taken a psychology class, even though I teach psychology now.

So my training is definitely more in evolutionary anthropology than than psychology. Um and then how I got into this, oh I'm gonna take you guys on a journey. It's great. Journeys are great. We both did we we literally spent an entire episode talking about how each of us discovered an evolutionary approach to psychology in particular. Yeah, we got deep into it. I Dave got back all the way back to his childhood. So I think go as go as deep as you want. Okay. So I'm going to take you back to my adolescence. So as like an older teenager kind of emerging adult, I was very into um bushcraft, like uh what we call first skills, right? And so I spent actually two years at a survival school in Washington State um tanning

hides and foraging. And this school also had an element like a homeschool or unschooling kind of kids' nature program. And so we would get all we would learn to mentor people, and they would always tell us, like, hunter gatherers learn like this, hunter gatherers do that. And I was like, okay, where's the where's the actual research? So I started off in cultural anthropology after that. And um I found a really great mentor there, but it wasn't quite a right fit in terms of content. Like I learned so much and I was super passionate about it, but there was always something missing. And I was scrolling on Facebook during an undergrad class and on a homeschooling blog they posted about this book called Hunter Gatherer Childhoods edited by Barry Hewlett

and Michael Lamb. And I was like, this is it, like this is what I want to do. So I just went through the list of all the contributors in the book and emailed a bunch of people and ended up at Cambridge to work with Frank Marlowe. And he unfortunately retired right as I was starting for my master's. So I had to find another supervisor who ended up being the editor of the book, the only other person there, Michael Lamb. So that's kind of how I got into this stuff. And my best friend Luke and I we spent like a few months of our lives like on these logging roads in Washington State, like trying to make it. And we were so hungry and so incompetent and so bad at everything. And like we would always fantasize about like other camps being along the different logging

roads where we could just drop by for some food. And for me, it was like really foundational like lessons in like really three things in cultural evolution that we talk about. Like the first is like it takes a long ass time to learn to be a good hunter-gatherer, like you're not gonna do it in two years. The second thing is you need a lot of cooperation. And the third thing, which I think we talk about less, but we were on these like super monocrop logging forests, right? That just had no ecological diversity. But traditionally, a lot of the communities, indigenous communities of that region would be really tending the environment to produce food. So, in terms of niche construction, like that's the other thing, like tending your

environment to your needs is the third thing that we really learned in the literature. So what what is niche construction? Just for those who don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So like a beaver is the kind of quintessential example of niche construction, right? Like you dam a river and you make a pond and you live in the pond. And humans do that all the time, right? We curate our environment to fit our needs. So we make clothes. That's an example of niche, which means that we don't need to be furry in cold environments, but we also curate the foragers that I work with in the Congo Basin, for example, they'll replant parts of wild tubers to regenerate that growth. And they know where those areas are and they can come back to it.

So the way in which we curate our environment to produce food and other resources that we need is really central to uh what it means to be a successful hunter-gatherer. And you know, 10 years now that I've been actually doing or nine years that I've been doing field work with actual hunter-gathers and I'm still so bad at all of it, even though I try like four year olds surpass me in their I've taken whole ass university botany courses in a four year old. I'm like, is this the food one? And she's like, nope. Like with an eye with an eye roll. Yeah. Yeah. With a little eye roll. Like, come on, girl, you're you're an adult. Get this together. Amazing. So yeah, no, Dave, go ahead. Yeah. I mean, I mean, what you're describing um challenges sort of this pop

evolutionary psychology notion that our ancestors were dumb cavemen hitting each other with clubs, and that to take an evolutionary approach to human behavior is to figure out how we are dumb cavemen or monkeys deep down, and how that is driving us insane in the modern world. And part of the goal of this podcast is to move beyond that popular understanding to recognize that actually making a living as a hunter-gatherer in the wilderness is extremely difficult and cognitively demanding. And our ancestors were not dumb cavemen. They were sophisticated herbalists, horticulturalists, toolmakers, political strategists, you name it. And so once we take a proper understanding of the complexity and the cognitive

demands of the of the human evolutionary niche, the design of the human mind becomes uh much uh uh clearer. Or at least we we we have a better sense of what kinds of cognitive uh equipment we're dealing with and and why we why we possess those cognitive tools. Yeah. I think I'll I'll add to that, but first I'll caveat that I work with contemporary hunter-gatherers. So I can kind of generalize from there about what would, but they live in modern environments every night in the village where I work, which has no electricity, they spend all day charging these enormous beakers and we dance all night. Like grandmas all the way through four-year-olds just parties. So it's like obviously they're contemporary people, but a lot of the activities that they

do can tell us a lot about, you know, when we take into account whatever changes and technology can tell us some things about the past. But that said, you know, we have many, many years of being of being anatomically modern humans. And so we can tell a lot about the past by knowing about this very kind of long-ranging subsistence strategy. I always say the people are modern people, but the subsistence strategy is our defining subsistence strategy. And by studying it, we can learn a lot, like you say. And it's it is a fact that you know, it's really hard to make a living. And then the other thing too is like there's this. I have a very close colleague and friend, Annamika Milk, she's an archaeologist, and we've

worked together on some experimental archaeology with hunter-gatherers because this is another fallacy. So, archaeologists, when they do experiments with spear throwing and stuff, they get undergrads at university with absolutely no background, and they're like, throw these spears in in the quad, and then they're really bad at it. And they're like, spears are not efficient. And so we've done these. Um, she started off doing spear throwing experiments with javelin athletes and was able to show that they throw really, really far, but they're not very accurate because they don't need to in their craft. And then we did it with the community that I work with in the Congo Basin that hunt with spears.

And because it's a rainforest, they don't shoot from very far, but they're incredibly accurate from where they're comfortable. And in her work, she always says, like, the more simple the technology, the harder it is to use because you have to be closer, you have to be stronger, you have to be like with a bow and arrow, you can be pretty far, right? But if you're stalking an animal with a spear, you have to be so quiet, so aware of all the elements and everything. So the more complex the technology is to make, the easier it is to use, and vice versa. So probably early spear hunters, right, which is predates bow hunting, for example, would have been just as if not more cognitively complex in terms of

what they were able to do than than you know folks who came after that. Yeah, I mean just thinking about being alone in the wilderness with a spear trying to hunt and kill my dinner. Uh that doesn't sound easy. I mean, you have to build the spear first. You have to find you know the right materials, the right kind of wood, the right kind of spear tip. You have to fashion you have to have the right size, the right length, you have to understand the logic of aerodynamics and w what distance, how far away you should be, uh you know, all this complicated stuff. It it doesn't sound like a walk in the park by any stretch. Yeah, and you imagination. Because it's it's a team sport. I love like I took this like business class during my masters.

It was like such a random thing. It was about women in business. What was I doing there as a mystery? And the guy started off by being like, we need to take into account our evolutionary roots. Men are solo hunters and women cooperate together. And I was like, I'm out of here. Like it's so incorrect because so much of hunting is actually a cooperative activity. Um and if anything, more so than for than like the traditional if we're you know we can talk about whether those gender divisions labor of labor are kind of uh realistic in the the imaginary one but if we just think about foraging i in terms of plant food it's a lot more individualistic than hunting is so you're oh yeah go ahead David yeah I mean I was just gonna add to that I mean, beyond the challenges of hunting the

animal when the animal is in your sights, there is the added, arguably more difficult challenge of finding the animal in the first place. Yeah. And that itself requires a whole lot of cognitive uh skills of being able to know the the seasonal mating patterns and the distribution of the local flora and fauna, uh, you know, where different uh plants grow, uh where different animals congregate, being able to track an animal by its footprints, um or by this the stuff it leaves behind or the marks it makes on trees. Like this is incredibly complicated detective work. Uh and so uh our brains were really um quite useful for us. Uh they're they're not just this this uh useless Absolutely. It's it's a lot of work to power a brain, I think.

And there's a reason for that. Yeah. So she you're on this Jeep Road. And this is before you were interested in anthropology, is that right? So well, I wouldn't say before, because my dad is also an anthropologist. So I really tried to get away. And I was like, oh, I'm gonna be a lawyer. Like I'm gonna subvert my parents and become a lawyer. Um and you know, for my best efforts, I was kind of led back. I would say like even as a young kid, like whenever we traveled or when I like had problems with my friends, like my parents would always say, Well just like take a step back and like c approach it like an anthropologist. And so that was like very much a lens that I grew up with. And my dad, bless his soul.

Like he's just the he's 80 now. He's still writing papers. He's like, I'm finally retired. I can focus on research. Uh and even now, like the way that he under, we were watching. Have you guys watched Love is Blind on Netflix? It's it's bad television. I recommend it. And he we he was visiting us and he like got really into it, watched it with us. And he was like, I want to write a paper comparing all the different like romantic norms because now there's like love is blind Japan, love is blind Sweden, love is blind Germany, and he he got like super psyched. So I think there's always been that bit of it. My dad uh did field work for his PhD but didn't love field work, and I think that's where we really differ because I love the communities that I work with, I love being in the

field. Um, I have learned so much and like I you know when you just like make great friends, like that's how it feels in the village where I work. So that's really a motivator for me to keep going at this point. Yeah. When you I mean, in and we're you when we can start talking about some of the content maybe of what you study. One of the things we talked about in this the past episodes, and I think one of the themes so far has been that science in general and an evolutionary approach. And then especially, I think, and you can tell me if you agree with this, anthropology. And then even within that, studying children, which is actually something I do as a psychologist, or even studying adaptations, or you know, just the way people work, it's

very um, it's very much that you are um taking you're quieting down and you're sort of listening to groups of people who are not being listened to by others, right? It's sort of there there a common theme, I think, has been that um in the noise and bustle, especially of the modern world, um that there's sort of one of the the themes of the people we've talked to, and I think even David and myself is that there's at some point a realization that like things are complicated, we don't understand them. And in order to understand things, we have to ask parts of life that haven't been listened to. And for example, I mean, uh, kids are a great example of that. Um, a non a non-weird society is a great example of that.

Um, and so you know, I wonder is that is when you talked about your dad sort of said approach things like as an anthropologist, there's a lot of ways to take that um statement. And I'm just wondering, is that number one, what does being anthropologist mean to you? And then number two, does this idea of uh respecting um things that might be overlooked by most people? Is that something that sort of resonates with you? Or does that sound familiar? Yeah. I mean, for sure. And the shocking thing is like a lot of things that are overlooked are so easily remedied. Like even in the west, like I've a friend and colleague Yvonne Kruppen. He got his PhD at Harvard doing kind of classic child development.

He was like, finished his PhD, started doing cross-cultural work, and he was like, I don't know anything about kids. Like, I spent my entire PhD testing kids and I never talked to any. And it's so easy to remedy, right? And actually talk to kids about why they make the choices they're doing in experiments. Talk to people about why they parent the way they do, why they act the way they do. Like people love to tell you about themselves in any culture around the world. They would love explaining things. So it's like such an easy fix. Um, and I think like in the be an anthropologist thing, I will say, like, as somebody who's like very socially anxious, anxious and like very worried about breaking norms, when you go

into a culture that you're not familiar with, it's just like you're gonna fuck up. Like, and then you just you just let go, you know, and you and then people correcting you and telling you you're doing something wrong is actually part of the research. So unless you violate a norm, you're never gonna realize that that norm exists because it's implicit and it takes people correcting you and saying, No, you like I remember one of my first um so the first time I was alone in the field, I went to follow this family into a forest camp and I brought a tiny bit of salt and some like magic cubes to share. And this person who now is of my very close friend, this woman came up to me and she was like, You're not sharing, right?

And like basically told me, like, you didn't bring enough stuff to share with everybody. You can't just share with one person, like it like laid out all these sharing norms for me, right? And like when you just don't know anything and you're completely novice or novel in an in a social environment, you just have to be okay with violating norms. And it in a way it's a sense of freedom, right? Than like, I'm tipping 20%. Should I have tipped 22%? I can't remember like if it's this venue or this setting where you're, you know, you realize that you're having an effect on that. And then having that feedback very directly because everybody agrees that you're bad at something rather than you're an asshole is really freeing.

So I think that's been like a really useful lesson of anthropology for me. Um and then the other bit that we get to do as human behavioral ecologists is the quantitative bit. So we're not only talking to people, we're also following them around and taking notes about what they're doing. So that's a lot of fun too. I think you get the kind of depth and breadth when you take both approaches. Yeah, that's right. Historically, I mean my I have a cart car cartoonish possibly, probably very much probably, uh view of the history of anthropology, even though I sort of have a foot in it, which is sort of there had long time been just sort of the ethnography thing, which is just sort of you go, and it was sort of, you know, largely colonial sort of, but it was sort of, you

know, somebody going to this strange place and writing a book about their experiences. And even as my undergrad experience, like this was a lot of what I was reading, ethnographies. I loved it, you know, Colin Turnbull, the Mbouti, um, things like that, the Forest People, things like that. Um, the the the history of sort of adding the quantitative part. Do you have um do yeah, do you have thoughts on on sort of what your representation of that is or yeah, I mean I think in the really early ethnographies there was quantitative work involved in it. People were taking, you know, kinship diagrams is a social network, right? Um even the cooler ring, Malinovsky's work on trade, right? Um, Margaret Mead was doing IQ tests with kids and showing that they weren't taking the

straight path, they were taking the most beautiful path because that's where all the you know, inter like challenging intelligence tests. So some of the earliest work I think did include quantitative work. And that was when anthropology was a little bit more ingrained within more of the social or biological sciences. And then as there was a divergence between more of the humanities track and the quantitative track, evolutionary and cultural anthropologists kind of separated. And then we got more of that distinction. And I think there's good reason for that, right? Counting people does violence in a way. And we need to contend with that in our field. You reduce people to numbers, um, you draw out their boundaries, which could be

wrong. And then, you know, those are still used in Canada, those are used in court cases around indigenous land cases. So there's a lot of kind of tricky things in terms of the ethics of counting. Um, but then at the same time, like I always come back, I work with a lot of social anthropologists, and we often like, for example I did a study on play and work and a social and you know I was quantifying this and a social a social anthropologist was like we you can't separate them like they're part of the same and I was like I know it's just a model it's not real I'm not saying this is how the community conceives of it I'm saying we have to make a boundary somewhere if we're gonna look at the trade off in these activities.

And I think that's where we have to make concessions on, we have to be critical of our work, which I think evolutionary anthropologists aren't in writing. I think we're very actual very critical. There are exceptions, but I think we are more willing. Let me back up. So I think we come from a scientific tradition in writing, which means that when we talk about theory, we talk about something that exists in the world. But when you actually talk to most evolutionary anthropologists, their theory is like very shaped by the community that they work with, right? So, like Brooke Shells's work, for example, um, on this kinship category that is, I'm gonna butcher it, but it's on, and she would be a great person for you guys to have

on your podcast too, but on um like extramarital um children of the himba, there so the husband has a specific kin term for that child, which me which means child, but has a different, like it's a different word. And that led to a lot of her research on, you know, these extramarital relationships amongst the Himba. Thinking of Jeremy Coster's work on hunting and food preferences and how uh amongst the um Myagna and Nicaragua, their hunting preferences don't match the expectations we would have for optimal forging people because culture and people have food preferences, and some food tastes good and other meat doesn't, right? So things like that. And you realize, like, oh, we're all talking about it at conferences and in our

presentations, but when you start writing like a scientist, then you have a background with theory and then a method section, and you don't, it's harder to report that kind of iterative nature of the development of these theories. And I think that's something we could probably work on in terms of improving even just our storytelling. Scientific articles are so boring. They're boring to write, they're boring to read, they're behind a paywall, so nobody reads them anyways. And we could do a lot better storytelling through podcasts like this, but also through just more narrative writing about our science. Yeah. And I think like anthropo every anthropologist I talk to, uh, and I try to talk to them as

much as possible. Like John Patton, who uh was a dear uh dear person I talked to who passed away recently. Every HBAS, you know, I study group conflict. And I feel like every time I got to talk to John Patton, it was like I was like a kid in a candy store, where it was keeping me honest because I'm just like some some dumb psychologist, you know, in the lab and talking to John, he's like, no, this is what it's like in a small scale social world where everybody knows everyone else. And this is what female leadership looks like, and nobody even knows about it unless you know the field site for 30 or 40 years. So yeah, no, I really like anthropology is so important to the evolutionary behavioral

sciences. And really, and I'm I'm uh maybe we can talk about this a little bit later. Um, but one of the trends that I I've talked to many, especially evolutionary psychologists, about is that um the the separation between sort of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology in terms of like conferences and things, and some of it's practical, like just summer field work and things, but but there's a concern of that being separate more separation. And I think really anthropologists really keep us, meaning like the psychologists, honest. And I really don't want to be in an evolutionary behavioral sciences where there's no anthropology talking to psychologists. Right. You don't want it to all be like mating stuff, college mating studies.

Even that, I mean, even in it's a similar thing to like what you described in your class, the the the the the management class, um, where I went to a psychology department uh and I was in a psychology department for a while where there was no interaction with the anthropology department here at UCSB, you know, as an undergrad or as a grad student, I took classes with Mike Gervin. You know, the CP is in an anthropology is in the anthropology department. You know, it was if you look at the faculty, it's like anthropsych, anthropsych, anthropsych. I mean, just down the line. And then I went to a psychology department where there was no interaction with psychologists and or psychology department, no anthropology uh anthropologists, excuse me,

and people would just say things and I'd be like, no, there's like this society that does this. I became like the anthropologist in the room for my you know, my the novice one, but at least the amateur, like, so I was really struck with how important it is to have this like broad cultural, ecological perspective for psychological claims. And in uh evolutionary psychology and psychologists especially, I think, uh really are not kept in check without having um talking to to folks like you for example and i think i think also vice versa i mean experiments can really help deepen your understanding of a community especially when you talk to people during the experiment so like for example this summer i i i always say i only do

experiments to prove them wrong um and this summer we were doing a an imitation experiment um because we have this idea that we have age-based imitation biases. So kids prefer to learn from adults, presumably because adults have like survived in the until adulthood and they probably know more, right? And a lot of my work has shown that kids spend a lot of time learning from other kids. So we're like, let's do an experiment and see in these communities where there's a lot of peer imitation or sorry, peer learning, whether we were able to instigate this in in this community. And so I'm doing this experiment with this little girl. And first we're showing them pictures of a peer and an adult that they don't know from a

different village far away. And we're like, who do you want to learn from? And that she's just like, skip, skip. And then finally she like looks at me, she must have been like six or seven, super frustrated. She's like, I can't pick because I don't know these people. And it was like, oh, like of course, like in a small-scale society where you know every single person there, you're not using age heuristics, those are meaningless. You're using your detailed knowledge of what people can do, like in a much more straightforward way. And it was like, okay, that's gonna go in the paper, I think. Yeah. That's so fascinating. I mean, the idea, I mean, that our entire society is structured around learning from

strangers, that we don't know our teachers. Yeah. That that is an incredibly alien way of learning. Yeah. Um which is kind of frightening when when you think about it, just just how weird and alien our our entire education system is to in terms of the design of the human mind. That we are sitting down in chairs um passively receiving information from an adult stranger who uh doesn't really have our best interests at heart at the end of the day and is just being paid to be there uh and to teach us stuff. Uh and uh it's it's kind of shocking that there uh isn't as much integration between um anthropological research on children's learning and our our actual education system. You would think that this would be vital information for designing educational sist uh

systems that uh jive with the human mind and with in with the natural way in which we learn things, and yet they're completely disconnected. Uh I I don't I know of no uh person in education who is familiar with uh this kind of anthropological research. Um so what do you think are the implications of your work for for education, given that you you know so much about the ways in which children learn, how are those ways different from how they learn in in uh Western uh societies? Yeah, I'll tell you first about what I thought before my kids started doing phonics and then I'll tell you what I think about so I mean what we know from the research in many, many small-scale communities, including migrant communities to the US

who, you know, come from indigenous backgrounds but are living in like Los Angeles, right? Um we know that they're much better able to attend to more stimuli at the same time than one thing at a time. So they're paying attention to many, many individuals doing things rather than focusing on one person at a time. There's um an emphasis on doing things together rather than, you know, well, I'm the adult. Here's some like kind of disarticulated tasks. Trust me, they lead to something meaningful, right? Um and um the goal is not learning, the learning is peripheral to the goal of doing something together. And that's a really different perspective on learning, right? Um I think it's important to think back to the history of formal education, which uh

really is about two things and um might get a little bit political here, but one is about well, what do we do when there's child labor laws and everybody's gotta be in the factory and the kids are in the streets, like we gotta put them in school. And number two, how do we make future workers. And those are valid kind of every education system, formal or informal, is about how do you make kind of individuals who are able to do things that they need to do in their society, right? And that I think a lot of our education system reflects those, the, those things. The problem is that we have path dependencies in our in our institutions, and we're we're we don't seem to be able to adapt to the fact that that's not really true anymore, and

probably most people aren't working in factories, and probably they could learn to work in factories pretty straightforwardly. So then, how do we, you know, support the kind of creative learning that and more independent learning that happens in a lot of these places, in a lot in the majority world. Um, there's some cool initiatives. So there's like schools, like uh um democratic schools that David Lancey writes a lot about, and and David Gray as well. A lot of Davids coming up in this talk, guys. I know it gets becomes confusing, yeah. And that's a lot more about collective decision making where the kids are saying to these teachers that are roaming about, okay, we want to work on a project on this topic.

And can you support us in learning about this topic? So a lot more student student led learning. Um I think it doesn't necessarily have to be somebody that you know that's teaching you, but there is a lot of research, not mine, but a lot of interesting research that suggests that socio um communicative norms, if they're not in line with your teachers, you're just going to have a harder time learning. And this has a lot of implications, especially for minority kids who come from different cultural backgrounds. There's some great examples in anthropology of norms about eye contact. So we think of eye contact as polite. And in some indigenous societies, making eye contact is considered really rude.

And so when you have, you know, a majority like probably European descent teacher working with an indigenous kid, and she's like, This kid is so rude, he's not making eye contact with me. Then you have this mismatch of norms in the classroom that can really hinder learning. So, even just an awareness of that, not in a superficial way, but you know, in getting to know students and getting to know the different ways they communicate, um, I think is something that would be really cool to do. There are more and more kind of teacher researcher initiatives where teachers are being trained to do anthropological work in their students' households. And one great example of this is called the funds of knowledge approach, which was done, I

think it was in Arizona, where there's a lot of Mexican migrants. And they train these teachers in anthropological methods, sent them out to these households. And then the teachers are like, oh, like these families know things. Like we can, we're not starting at zero. We're starting from all the knowledge that they have in terms of their social networks, in terms of like their business acumen, like kids are participating in all this commerce. Like, let's let's build our lessons around that. And it's such an amazing, refreshing way. And I think if a big problem is that we don't, at least in the UK, there's so much pressure on meeting these milestones for teachers that there's not really the time for them to be

creative in their approach to education. Um, And that's what it would really need. Like a big, you know, there's the need that justifies innovation, but there's also having time, which I think is probably more the human approach, right? The more time you have, the more creative you have. You can make mistakes, you have that protected time. And it would be, I think that's the bit where we could really make some progress. Okay, but then that said, so now that my kid is learning to read, I think one thing that I've learned is there are some skills where you need dedicated teachers who are really specialized at teaching things. And I have wondered now whether our kind of pivot in the post-industrialized West towards so much teacher-led teaching has a lot to do with

literacy and kind of disembodied math, like right, just like numbers that aren't related to actual things. And that you kind of need to get over that hurdle with very direct active teaching um in that setting before and then that leads to kind of these recursive loops where then once you're able to read and you have you've been exposed to that type of education, then you just reproduce that and over and over with your family and you get kind of runaway cultural evolution in in that type of um teaching style. I don't know, but it's been, you know, rattling around in my head. Yeah. So the idea to so um to make sure I understand the idea is that it might be sort of an all the above approach in that there are some cases where that direct

disembodied math or that just m mapping phonemes to to weird squiggles on the page. That's just sorry, for a little while we're just gonna do regular uh regular teaching. Somebody's gonna stand up and talk to you and tell you what to do and you're gonna like it. But but of course, then the thing where we have like collective autonomy, creativity, that also needs to be nourished too, or in and and it's all the above sort of thing. Absolutely. And I think there's a lot of parts of our lives that we could probably do better. Like there's no kids in the street. I don't know if you guys have noticed, like, there's no kids about when you go to any country anywhere else in a majority of the world, there's like children out and about doing

things. Even you go to Spain. Yeah, Germany. I was I was just living in Germany for the past nine years. I mean, actually, I mean, selfishly, one of the reasons I like we wanted to invite you so soon was because I spent my my existence in Germany was like great playgrounds, seeing having autonomy in Germany and again coming back to the US. And the playgrounds in the US are sort of like I'm doing a pat on the head, like you know, nonverbal. Like it was clearly designed by somebody. Um, and this is like almost all playgrounds, they're getting a little bit better. And there is a there is a um uh a movement to cut to create what are called in innovative playgrounds, where basically it's the the you know, you just ask the question, is this look

fun to you as an adult? Like is this somewhere that would be pleasant or interesting? Or is it basically like a bunch of stairs, you know? Um and uh and it like playgrounds in Europe and especially Germany, uh I didn't realize this, but playgrounds were started in Berlin. Um playgrounds in Berlin are amazing and it was a huge part of our life. My son having autonomy, walking around, kids walking around, kids are just everywhere, and the social structure is is built to like think about kids and then coming back to the US and I'm like, wow, not at all. You know, and I realize I really feel this that um and maybe the UK is similar to US in this respect, maybe it's a bit in the middle. So we so just like for listeners, like in Germany, because we were in Leipzig and in

Germany it's like I can only describe as like a World War II bombsite turned into a playground. Like I don't know if that was your like a lot of jagged edges and like 20-foot high slide. YouTube playgrounds in Germany. And uh you'll see. Yeah. You know, it's like the definition of risky play. And then here is like the kind of foamy grounds, like no, no kids are getting hurt, but it's also a little bit less fun at the same time. Um, and yeah, there's just not a lot of place to to involve kids. There's like kid-focused stuff that you have to drive them, drive them to, but there's not like places for adults hang out with their kids. That's not the yeah. The exception here is that you can take kids to pubs, which is very different for me as a

Canadian, where you never take a kid to a bar, right? Right. But here, like there's a few pubs with playgrounds in them. So you can watch your kids while you have a beer. Exactly. Um, so I think that's kind of the British exception. So every country has its own kind of strange exception that feels surprising to everybody else. Um, but yeah, overall, I would say like kids are out of sight, They're not part of society, and that's a shame. Yeah, what what consequences? I mean, and and maybe this starts getting into you as a human being living in these in a very different culture, and every culture is different. But you know, what do you either either from a scientific perspective or just a personal

perspective, being a parent, but also you know, being knowing the people in these different places, you have a very unique perspective. Like, what do you think are the the consequences? And is it the I mean I think a cartoonish view I might have, and I'm just thinking this out loud right now, is that maybe like Aka are the right and we're wrong. And maybe that's oversimplified. But just in terms of you know what the kids are like or the consequences for the um for humans because every generation grows up, right? Like you become you become an adult. And so every kid now will be an adult and every adult was a kid. You know, you what is tell I don't even know what the question is because I don't even know

what what the question should be because you have that perspective. So please like what what what do you think is important to share about that that knowledge that you see? These are kids growing up in a very different place, very different responsibilities, very different ability to take risks, have autonomy. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, like, again, coming back to the thing that like every formal and informal education is adapted to this social and ecological environment that you grew up in, right? And so like we we had my son in Denmark, and there they do something that I would never do, even though I come from an equally cold country, which is like led keep let kids sleep in a stroller outside and sometimes like out of sight.

Like you're just like, all right, that's something, but it's very adapted to that social environment and to that ecology, and the kids grow up fine. And what was really interesting for us is like for me, at least. Um, so when the nurses visit you at home and they do the assessments after you have a baby and like they then they come again a few times. And at nine months they do an assessment like, is your kid ready for preschool, like for nursery kindergarten for um uh what do they call it in North America? Now I've gone fully British. Yeah. Um French. Yeah. So is it for like child daycare, daycare, daycare, thank you. Yeah, because I had it, I had kita in Germany. So yeah, no, David can tell us.

Yeah, yeah. It's 10 30 p.m., guys. I'm doing my best. No, thank you. So so that she she comes through and she's like, Can your kid wave? Write the assessment. Like, are they ready for daycare? Can they wave? Um, do they eat well? And then the last one is like, do they fall asleep in the stroller, in the like in the buggy, right? And that's not a question that we would include in the UK on child development, right? That's a very culturally specific one. I loved for my kids, so the UK wide assessments that they do, one of the assessments for social development was like, can they get dressed alone? Which is of course not a so it's not about the social at all. It's about the individual autonomy, right?

So again, these are all things that reflect the environment. And I think for the bayaka that I work with, the way that they parent also reflects their environment. So from very, very early on, there's a lot of physical stimulus, right? Kids are held upright very early on. They're worn inside slings so they have the full view of what's going on around them. And the moms, you know, for the most part, take them into the forest. So they feel that rhythm of it's hard to imagine like using a machete while you're carrying your baby. But if you think about the embodied lessons of that from the earliest age, right? We think about the evolution of our brains, but the kind of brain-body connection, especially when you're using your body all the time, is really important too.

So they're getting that input from very, very early on. Also, a lot of touch. So co sleeping, on demand breastfeeding, you just see these kids passed around, everybody in camp. Um, so they're getting a lot of alloparental support and a lot of play and a lot of autonomy from an early age. So you'll often see kids as early as they can grasp with a dull knife just hacking away at something, doing the kind of object play that we see here with kids with blocks, right? Hit the block over and over again. Hey, that's great, that makes a noise. Doing it with knives, and you know, some people in the literature have called it laissez-faire parenting, where you kind of hands off, but actually, it's not that at all.

Everybody, right? If you think of like the average American living room, you've got 30 people living in that space. Everybody's very aware of what the kid is doing and whether or not they're safe. And I've definitely seen parents turn kids away or change out a knife for a duller one so that they can't hurt themselves, move a kid away from a fire. And it's these really subtle interactions that are redirecting kids. And these are other parents that are moving the kid away from everybody. Everybody's in teenage girls, teenage boys, siblings, grandparents. If I were to pick up someone else's child and move them out of harm's way. I remember my wife and I were at a restaurant, and our daughter was like climbing this hill

and like sliding down the hill and like treating this hill like a slide. And some random woman just like picked her up and thought that she was like falling. And it was crazy, it was like this monstrous violation of a social norm that she would have the gall to pick up our child. And then she's like, apparently she's okay, is what she said. Um and but the contrast between that and an environment where everyone has got an eye on everyone else's kid and it's totally fine if I go up and pick up someone else's kid and move them away. It's just a very different world. Uh and I mean, but I I don't know what it was like in West Germany, David, other David, but in East Germany, people tell kids off in like public transit all the time for being too

loud. Oh, yeah, no, no, no, no, totally. Yes. Yeah. And adults yell at other adults for violating norms. We were there during the pandemic and the rules were constantly changing about what type of masks you were allowed in. So if you just weren't up to date from a midnight change, you could get yelled at in a grocery store by another adult in German, and I don't speak German. So that was always tough. Like, I don't know why you're yelling at me. No, exactly. So I think it the kind of rugged individualism of North America of yeah, North America all through Canada in there is is quite different where from these a little bit more collectivistic cultures where there's a lot more. And in in the UK you would never do that too.

But in Germany you definitely would. And in Denmark maybe a little bit as well. So letting the kids play with a dull knife, um, you know, that's sort of the opposite of helicopter parenting. And it's not random, like you said. To what do you attribute why that is either in the minds of the people? Like what is to be anthropological, sort of what's the emic or etic uh explanation of that? You know, what's the what's going on in the minds of the people? And then what from an ecological perspective, why is that sort of what where where everyone's at? Mm-hmm. So in terms of like what people say, um, for them, there's a high premium on childhood autonomy, but it's a very different type of autonomy that we think

about, which is very individualistic. Um, the autonomy that a lot of hunter-gatherers, including the community that I work with, practices like cooperative autonomy. So the idea everybody's doing their own thing, but you all kind of know that everything's gonna benefit the group. And this is like a very classic thing that we see, like in the morning, everybody's like ping, ping, ping, like off to their own activities. And you're like, even if you ask a husband, like, where's your wife? He's like, oh no, she she's out. Um, but then at the end of the day, it's like all the food's being cooked. And then there's you have these kids running from hearth to hearth, sharing these plates of food and redistributing those resources.

Right. And if I don't have enough palm nuts, I'll come grab some for you from you. And if you don't have enough castle cassava leaves, um, I'll give you some, right? Like, so it's very kind of communal in that way. But with very strong norms, it's hard because you don't tell people what to do, but you can demand goods from them. So you can demand things, but you can't tell people what to do. And even inferring what people think, often I'll be like, why did that person go off into the forest? Like trying to do behavioral observations in absence, and people will be like, uh, I don't know, it's their own thing. Like, even if they're even if they probably do know, you would never kind of verbalize why

you think somebody is doing something if they've not expressed that themselves. So there are those norms. And I'll also say, like, the only time I've seen people tell each other what to do is when a parent was trying to tell their kid what to do or not to do. And that's when other parents intervened and like let them do their thing. And so there's this view that kids um wait wait so so so parents were telling their kids what to do and then other parents interjected on the child's behalf so that the child could be could be left alone. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That is fascinating. If there's any kids listening they're like man that sounds awesome. Yeah. So so like what we see is like parents will be like, my kid knows what they need to learn

right now. And even if um my colleague Dasha Bomjakova has done a lot more kind of cultural anthropology work, but people will talk about um from a child develop like on child development. And from her work, we know that in the same community where I work, like the conception of child development is like a ripening fruit. You cannot speed up a fruit to ripen, right? But you can curate the environment around it, So you can clear the ground, you can add nutrients, you could do the things that will help that ripen, but you can't be the one physically make it ripe ripen, which is very different than plant metaphors in other places. Like in Japan, some of the plant metaphors are, you know, uh a child is like a tree, you

need to straighten it, right? So it's very much about the modification of the kid themselves. Whereas in what we see is not about modifying the kid. It's about modifying the environment around the kid to ensure that they learn. And so people doing things around a campfire is a way for kids to learn. We tried to do this experiment and it failed. And it took me years to understand that I failed the experiment, not that my like participants didn't understand. Like they understood exactly what they were telling me, and I was someone that didn't understand. So it's trying to um show videos of things that we would call teaching and ask them, is this teaching yes or no? Why or why not? And then I wanted to start the experiment by showing them clips of things that were

to me definitely not teaching, like a mom like braiding her kid's hair. Um, and everybody was like, Yep, it's teaching, yep, they're teaching. And then I just dropped the experiment because I was like, it's fatally flawed. I've done something horribly wrong. And then I realized, like, oh no, like for them, any act of being together is a form of teaching. Like it's just that simple. Living together is sharing information. Wow. Do you find that there is a concept of a bad parent or bad parenting in this culture that you work with? Um, because I know uh from you know personal experience with my own culture that that that is a huge uh concept for us of judging each other based on how good of a parent we are,

whether we're being irresponsible, whether we have the the kid's best interests at heart, whether we're keeping them safe. You know, you you mentioned the the story of people interjecting on the child's behalf. Often in Western cultures it's actually the opposite where where people will interject because you're not uh keeping us uh you're not you're not telling your child what to do. You're not keeping them safe. You're not paying enough attention to them. It's actually the opposite kind of of interjection. Um so I'm curious if there is this kind of parental status competition, for lack of a better term, in that community, along the lines of say, you're a bad mother because you don't breastfeed or whatever.

Like these are a big part of the cultural conversation here, and you could have tremendous loss of status for being seen as a bad mother or a bad parent. Is there similar kinds of status loss in the community you study, um, do people judge each other as a bad parent? Is there a different concept of a bad parent, or is that concept not even uh apply? I mean, I have to say, like there's with one exception that I'll say in a sec, I haven't really seen people talk about bad parenting. I've seen people talk about good parenting, which is doing things with your kid, feeding your kid properly, taking them into the forest. But in terms of bad parenting, I've seen grandmothers be annoyed that their daughter went

off to a forest camp with her husband and didn't come back for longer, kind of thing. But it's not really considered bad parenting. I think the one exception would be breaking taboos around diet during pregnancy, around sexual intercourse during pregnancy and postpartum, coming out of the line in period too early, eating the wrong food. So I would say more taboo breaking, especially in terms of diet. Again, I wouldn't say it's bad parent, but that's how people would explain negative consequences to kids, um, is in terms of those things. Um, yeah. Interesting. I mean, there are certainly lots of taboos around dieting and and and pregnancy here as well, um which, you know, makes evolutionary sense given the importance of fetal

development and what you're eating at the time that the that the fetus is developing and and the potential for, you know, uh uh teratogens to uh screw with fetal development. So that makes a certain amount of evolutionary sense that that um diet and pregnancy would be a hot topic for for taboos to arise. Yeah. I I I just find it so so fascinating that um among us, you know, being seen as a good parent is such a huge part of our identities and the fear of being a bad parent is such a huge driver of our behavior. But it seems like that that fear uh isn't present to the same extent. Um or or at least it's restricted to uh say food food taboos or sexual taboos, but it isn't quite as widespread as it is here.

Yeah. And I think part of that is like there's just this evening out effect of having loads of people take care of your kids. Um like real like in the village where I work, there's there's 700 people from two different um like cultural communities. And everybody lives in quite close quarters. There's one house in the center of the village that I call the house of a thousand people because it's pretty much as big as my a little bigger than my living room. And there's a grandmother, a grandfather, like four adult couples. So that's like eight people, and then all their kids that all live there. And like it's like a clown car when you see people come out in the morning, like just like more and more people coming out.

And they just live in super tight quarters. And when people get annoyed with each other, they go off to a forest camp for a while, then they come back. Like, so you just have that freedom of movement too, which also makes sure that people don't get too much on each other's nerves. And this brings us to like um, so like you mentioned, like there's a lot of L parenting. Um, you're really seeing front lines sort of the difference between parenting in a weird environment versus um kind of more ecologically valid, quote unquote. Um, What's your sense of that? Is that something like you know, we're all parents to fairly young children right now? Um do you have in your own experience, like do you feel like

do you ever think like, oh, I wish my child was growing up in in there? Or or you know, or is it just everything's different? And in um, yeah. There's so many trade-offs, right? So like when I was pregnant, I was like so romantic about it, it's like, I want to take my infant to the Congo, it's gonna be awesome. And then I have a friend who's like works in medical anthropology and epidemiology, and he was like, that is so dangerous. There's like no hospital, there's no road in the village where you work, like there are unsequenced mosquito born illnesses, right? And I think when I talk to a lot of people in the village about what they want for their future is like better medical care. And we have the luxury of that.

So it's hard to say like what would I want more or less of, right? And this is like I guess a hot topic right now, but like I think it's very easy to be anti-vaccine when you haven't seen kids die from those illnesses. And I've had, I've seen that in the villages where I work, despite vaccination campaigns. So, in that sense, I feel very grateful to have access to the medical care that I have access to. But at the same time, I do feel sad for my kid, who will probably be an only child, that he doesn't, you know, and his part of his family lives in the south of England, so six hours away, the other part lives in Canada. And he just doesn't get to grow up with like loads and loads of kids. So it's, you know, in you David Lancy talks about like in most of the world, parents don't

play with their kids. And it's easy not to play with your kids when there's 20 other kids in the neighborhood for them to play with. But if you're alone in a house, it's like, okay, then they're gonna what? Stare at a wall? Like, what are they gonna do? I've gotta get on the floor and play. So there are obviously changes, but I think it's not for me, it's not a question of like weird versus non-weird settings. There's a lot of diversity in how kids grow up. And it does in some ways calm my parent fear or my bad parent anxiety when I'm like, okay, if I just go out in the garden and like work on my garden, he can just come and do what I'm doing. And I don't always have to be doing what he's doing.

Like sometimes it can go in the other way. Or, you know, sometimes he does something that feels like the slightest bit, I don't let him play with knives, but like slightest bit dangerous. I'm like, okay, just this is nothing and compare and like just let him take that little bit more risk. That said, he is the most cautious child in the world. And that's my fault and my anxiety. So I don't think I've been super successful, but sometimes I when I'm able to turn that part of my brain on, it's like just take a step back, let him fall, he's gonna survive. So I think in that way, um, yeah, it has shaped me. Again, like I just wish there's more public places for kids to congregate. And then you could just let them run around and just make sure they're still there, kind of

thing. I think that would make a big change in in child development generally and parenting well-being as well. I don't know how you guys feel about that too. Yeah, I mean, uh, it's been striking. I mean, again, you know, it's nothing like Congo versus um UK or Canada, but just even Berlin versus you know Santa Barbara. I'm I'm seeing like the adolescent kids like hanging out at like Target and in Berlin. It was like they're just like hanging out in like beautiful parks, you know. And it's just sort of and it just feels sad. I feel bad for the kids. And you can, you know, it's just like, you know, I always think like if we were zoo animals, which is sort of a weird, it is kind of like an alien anthropological perspective.

Like, what would you put in there? Like, you need like a common space, like for people to just sort of like hang out and like sit together. And it's weird how our planning, at least in the suburbs, um, and I, you know, there's a there's a whole history of sort of racism and uh white flight and all kinds of reasons for why the the planning is the way it is in car culture. But um but no like Berlin, it felt like um it would it would have been a if I had to like stay in a 20 square kilometer or mile zoo pen, I would have preferred Berlin uh uh to to to to to Santa Barbara um wet weather notwithstanding. Um so that's that's my experience too. I don't know for David. Yeah, no, it's it's it's pretty similar.

Um I I I remember uh when I was traveling, I visited Berlin and I was all similarly struck by how well integrated uh the playgrounds were with the adult spaces and and I just hungered for something like that uh in the US and there just isn't really anything like that. I remember there was this awesome public space with like bars and restaurants and a playground, and it was all just mixed together. Uh and I man, I just wished that that there was something like that here, and there just isn't. Um Yeah. So I have two Darwinian mysteries that are on my mind about child development. I'm curious if you can help me solve them. It's okay if you don't have the solution. Okay. I feel it feels like a test.

Okay, we'll see, we'll see if we can solve it together. Darwinian mystery number one. So food and sleep are two basic human needs, right? Uh huh. And yet, my uh two-year-old daughter, she's about to be three in April. I cannot get her to eat, and I cannot get her to sleep. You'd think from an evolutionary perspective that she would be thrilled to get fresh, ripe fruit, delicious food beyond the wildest dreams of her ancestors. It's available for her. It's right there. She doesn't eat it. It's bedtime, she's clearly tired. She's rubbing her eyes and yawning and crabby, and she refuses to go to sleep. Why won't my kid eat and sleep? Okay, so what does she eat? Because presumably she eats something.

Uh well, it's so random and capricious. Like things that she was into the previous day, she's totally not into the next day. And she'll take one bite and say, I want different food. And then she'll eat one bite of another thing and say, I want different food. And then she'll just like get distracted by playing with some toy or like playing with her food. She's she's much more inclined on playing with her food than eating it, which is frustrating because I need to get her to eat her food so that we can get her on a schedule and get her to preschool or get her to bed or whatever. Um and okay, I think we found your so your I think we found your Darwinian problem. So like like I think it has to do with schedules.

So all of the like the kind of stress we put on ourselves and we put on our kids is just trying to get them to the next thing, which I am the same with like eat your goddamn porridge, we're gonna be late for school. so I think we're often training kids in our culture to be out of tune with their bodies and get in tune with these and because we do the same, right? Like kids are doing that in school too. Like raise your hand if you need to use a toilet. How dare you get up and follow your bodily functions or open a banana in class even though you're hungry. So I think a lot of it is that we're trying to get kids to eat when they're not really hungry, um, kind of thing, and trying to fit into a schedule, which again is cultural

learning, right? Like you do in our society need to suppress and learn to control these different desires um so that you can function as a member of society. And unfortunately at two and three that's it just is a little bit more time consuming to do that. Um, but in terms of food preferences, like there's a lot of research, uh, for example, by one of my PhD mentors, Alyssa Crittenden, that our brain really needs our growing brain needs a lot of sugar to grow. And so kids have these huge cravings for fruit, for honey, for sweet things, and those are the things that she probably does like, is my guess. Like, does she like blueberries and raspberries and like Cheerios and that kind of ice cream?

I'm assuming is a a preference. Yeah. And it's all to feed, like, yeah, all to feed a growing brain. So I don't have a solution because we would did all the like child led weaning and we were feeding him loads of weird stuff. And now at four and a half, it's like pasta or cucumber or pizza and cucumber. What are you gonna eat tonight, dude? Like there's not a lot of diversity there. I will say though, like in the Congo, people eat the same thing every day, like different variations of the same thing. And I think we might have too much diversity in our diets. Like we're just like eating something different every single day. And like there it's just like, are you having cassava leaves with caterpillars or are you

having cassava leaves with antelope tonight? Like so it's like a lot more kind of stable and there's maybe seasonal variation that changes. So I have wondered if we're just trying to cram too much diversity and it's just like here's the same nutritious food every single day, get on with it, kind of thing. So you think if I fed her the same thing every day? I don't know if you wanna do you want to do an unethical experiment. Run the experiment. All right, it's cassava leaves every day, whether you like it or not. Or David, I feel like I we're just like a therapy session for David because two and a half, two and a half year old, yeah. We're my my son's a little bit over five. You know, you're uh is four and something.

Yeah. Four and a half. It's easier David as they get older. Okay. That's good to know. That's good. I think there's also like an aspect of control. Like she is probably learning like how like how you're gonna parent her too. So as long as she can say no and you're like, okay, here's a different food, then she's like learning what you're willing to do for her, which is part of attachment, right? So it's not it's a good thing, even though it's tiring. And I would say the sleep thing too. I don't know, does she sleep with you guys or is she in her own room? In her own room. Yeah. A lot. It's really hard for kids in their own room. It's so funny because we co-slept and we planned to co-sleep. All anthropologists delude themselves that they're gonna sleep really well because they're

co-sleeping and um kind of thing. And then we all at conferences talk about how tired we are that our kids still aren't sleeping through the night. And um so our kid slept with us until we moved into this house, so until he was like three and a half. We finally started getting him into his own room, but we fall asleep with him in his bed, and then when he wakes up, he crawls into our bed. So is he really sleeping independently? That's debatable. But then I started talking to other people who sleep train, and some people are like, oh, like sleep training, that was so easy. Like my kids slept on their own. And then you then you beat them when they've had a second kid and they thought they were like really amazing parents who just had it all figured out.

And it turns out they just had like a really easy kid. And then the second kid is like, We can't get her to sleep. She's in our night every night, like in her bed every night, touching me. Like, so I think it just has to do a lot with like diversity in kids. But I think most kids don't aren't comfortable sleeping alone. And then again, it's about making sure that the parents can sleep so that they can wake up well rested and get to work and do their work, right? And I think there was like even a Facebook, like a Zuck, a Zuckerberg thing where they were paying Facebook was paying for sleep consultants for their staff because they were like, when aren't when our employees get good night's sleep, they are better employees.

So they were that was like one of the perks of working at Facebook. And like frankly, he's right. Like sleep deprivation is a really big issue for parents. So my guess is that that's probably what, but I I I couldn't tell you for sure. But co sleeping seems to be a pretty universal thing in in most parts of the world. Got it. Okay. Well that that's a pretty good solution. I think I I think I buy that for the most part. All right. Here's the other one. Yeah. No, I mean it makes sense. Like, you know, if she's sleeping by herself in the dark, she's like vulnerable to predators and attackers. Like, that's an unsafe situation for her to be in. It makes sense that she wouldn't want to be in that situation.

And yet, you know, I don't want her to sleep with me because she moves around a lot in her sleep. And I I've slept with her a few times and and it I always get horrible sleep when that happens because she you know she pokes me and you know tickles me or you know whatever during so that's it's not a good situation. So it's it's a genuine case of parent offspring conflict where she's better off if she's safer in the bed with me. I'm better off if I can better get a better night's sleep. And we just have incompatible preferences there. The food thing I think is still a little mysterious 'cause like uh you know, if if you're in a hundred-gatherer society, you don't know when your next meal y is gonna be, you know,

like you wouldn't it be a good idea to eat the food when it's there and it's available and and you know I haven't seen that much of people being b going hungry. Like I mean sometimes you just like have some tubers or whatever, but people usually have enough food to share with me, for example. Um so I haven't seen as many cases of of food insecurity of people really going hungry. Um yeah. So I maybe I'm maybe I'm overestimating overestimating how horrible uh life as a hunter gatherer must be. I have to say. like, I mean, people eat enough that the kids will stay up till like one in the morning playing and partying, right? So you have to have some kind of but you know, when you were talking about like parent um

offspring conflict, so what's really interesting to me about that is like parent offspring conflict can only ever be enacted in specific socioecologies, right? And so in the communities where I work, people wake up. We've done, like my colleague Lee Gettler and also David Samson and I have done um like ectigraphy studies on sleeping. And people wake up in the night and they get less sleep than we think people need, and they're fine. Like they're smarter, they're more capable, smarter than I am. And I've seen instances of the opposite where this kid was like to his mom, like, please, please, can we go to sleep? Like, I really want to go to sleep. And she's like, I'm not done. I'm not, I'm still out.

Like, I'm not going, I'm not taking you home yet. Wow, the parent is begging the kid. Sorry, the parent is sorry, the kid is begging the parent to sleep. That's crazy. Yeah. So it just depends on on you know the context of the conflict, right? Your need is to have a good sleep so you can get up and go to work. But in these communities, your need might be to stay up and socialize and you know do the kind of political hobnobbing that you have to do to make it in an egalitarian community. Egalitarianism is so stressful. Everybody thinks it's like utopia, but it's a lot of work to maintain. It's like gossip and redistribution and leveling and like punishment and like all this stuff happening constantly all the time in all these micro and macro social

interactions. So it might be in your best interest to be there for that for those interactions. And then your kid, it's like 11 p.m. and they just want to go to sleep because they've had a long day kind of thing. So yeah. Okay. Well my confusion about the food and sleep thing has been considerably reduced. I think you did a great job responding to that one. I I don't really study either of those things, but okay I have my second my second mystery for you. Okay. So my daughter often has extremely strongly held, seemingly arbitrary preferences. So for example, she feels very strongly that mama has to pour the milk and not Dada, even though it's the same damn milk. Or we're eating at dinner and there's you know a bowl of tortilla chips, and we're all

sharing the tortilla chips, and there's plenty of tortilla chips for all of us, and then randomly she has a meltdown because uh, you know, I I took a bite of a chip and she was mad because she wanted that particular chip. It wasn't that she wanted chips in general, and she was worried that there would be she wanted that chip. And she thought that I should have known that she wanted that chip before I took a bite of it. Or you this used to happen, you know, I was trying to get her, you know, all the the bedtime routine, trying to get her to bed. She would have these arbitrary preferences around bedtime. Like she would insist that I would wear a yellow hat uh every time I'd put her to bed while

I read her the bedtime story. She wants me to wear the yellow hat. I don't care, I'll wear I'll I'll wear the yellow hat, whatever. I uh you gotta pick your battles at a as a parent. But why the yellow hat? What what is it? Like why why does she have these strongly and she'll have a meltdown if I say no? So like why does she have these strongly held, arbitrary preferences? Oh God, that's a real stumper. Okay. Let's like the cog turns. The cog's turn. The turns cog. It's almost 11. Um okay, so I have I have I have two further questions about what could happen. And you tell me what you think feels like it rings true. Okay. So the one kind of avenue would be well, we're humans and we like rituals.

And so she's creating these everyday rituals to make sense of her world. And so that's just part of, you know, and maybe the kind of relatedly, but the second avenue is like rituals help us gain control. And probably if she's two or three, she doesn't probably have a lot of control over her everyday life, right? Like you're probably deciding maybe with her input what you're cooking, what you're doing, but ultimately she's not in charge. And so she's having to she's making these rituals to feel like she's in charge in these minor ways. Um, how how does that does that ring true? Does that sound like psycho babble bullshit to you? No, I mean I I I buy that as a as like approximate level explanation that that she

wants to have some control over my behavior. It's still a little puzzle. Yeah. There's not so it's true that in our culture, but we all live in different places. Maybe you also live in, maybe both Davids live in California. But here in the UK or in Canada or in Denmark, it's true that kids have meltdowns, right? I haven't seen that in many of the communities that I work in as much. no meltdowns. I've seen s I've seen a couple meltdowns, uh-huh, but nowhere like my kid has a meltdowns like three, four times, just any time we're just trying to get the house. But like there, I I haven't seen that frequency of meltdown. I've seen it when kids have been fascinating really tired. Um, I've seen meltdowns.

I I actually did. So let me tell you a little story. So this two and a half-year-old kid that I became very close to during my field work, and I'm also close with his mom. Um, he had this meltdown, and I was like, He's tired, because that's what we always say, right? Anytime there's a meltdown, we're like, the kid's tired. And she was like, he's hungry. And he fell asleep in my arms. And she while she was cooking the food. And then she was like, Oh my God, I think I should wake him up and feed him. And I was like, Oh my God, do you never wake them up? Like, what are you talking about? But like in her conception of like why kids have meltdowns, is that like they're really hungry. So I better feed get food in them, right?

Um, and he it wasn't it wasn't like he'd just skip dinner, right? So, but so I've seen a couple meltdowns of very, very young kids. But for the most part, it's not a daily occurrence. And keep in mind, I'm living in camp with people and I'm doing my research. So I see them all the time. So that's one thing. And then the other thing that I'll say is like when kids have a meltdown, parents are like just sweeping them up and then taking them on activities. Like this one time, this mom took her kid who usually hung out in camp foraging with her and her husband. And I was doing this research where I was asking parents every day, like why did why did you or did you not take your kid with you foraging?

And she said, oh my kid is like there's a word that doesn't really have an equivalent, but you when you hear it, you know it's like Kiri Kiri. So it's like all over the place, like kind of which is like a great word, right? Yes. Um she was like, my kid is just like yeah, my kid was just like Kiri Kiri in camp, like making fights with people and freaking out. So we just went out foraging and like just like we just went out and like did something. Um, and so there's a little less kind of tailoring to the crazy whims of the two and a half year old. But because they have a lot of autonomy over their everyday, they maybe also have fewer crazy whims. So I'm not sure your question is a I don't I don't think that I think we found maybe a

proxim approximate solution, approximal solution to your question, but I'm not sure there's actually an ultimate question there because there's so much diversity. I don't think it's necessarily an evolutionary puzzle. Interesting. I mean, so could it be that the reason why those kids aren't having uh so many meltdowns is bec is because they have so much autonomy and and ability to control what they do and when they do it. Uh and the reason why we see more meltdowns in uh Western educated, industrialized, rich democratic societies is that they have so much less control, that everything is dictated for them, what they do, when they do it, where they do it. And they have meltdowns to try to get some of the autonomy that they are

desperately craving and not getting. And perhaps that explains the strongly held arbitrary preferences, which is that that's another way to have the autonomy that that she would otherwise be getting in a in in a in an author gatherer society, but that she's not getting here. And question, does she go to like does she go to daycare? Does she go to some Yeah, no. She's in preschool right now, yeah. She's in preschool. Because the other thing that comes to mind is like she's probably not having meltdowns at preschool. And like kids are so good at controlling themselves in the right scenarios that that self-regulate like you get that self-regulation kind of fatigue and then you get home and you're like freak out at your parents, right?

Um, because one of the things that I have to shoehorn peer learning in, sorry guys. So like basically in a hunter-gatherer community, right? Like when you're about that age, like two or three, as soon as you can walk, basically, you follow These other kids, and you try to go with these other kids. And I've seen like what look to me like babies like toddle off into the forest behind like 10-year-old kids who look after them and make sure they're okay. But when you're around peers or when you're around um, yeah, like kids your age or a little bit older than you, you kind of have to self-regulate, and they're probably even if they're a little bit older than you too, they're probably helping you self-regulate.

And I've definitely seen seen kids tell tell other kids like how to self-regulate, either through play, like, oh, don't cry, like here have this, or like tease them about having a like having a meltdown in the rear kit. Like if they hurt themselves and they cry for too long, they'll give them a hard time about it. And so they're kind of teaching each other these self-regulation skills. And also they're not having to control themselves for these like very intense periods of time because they can go back and forth to their parents when their parents are in camp if they want to. So I I wonder about that too. Like maybe at school when she's playing with other kids and they're kind of engaging with

each other in terms of those self-regulation behaviors and then holding it together all day. It's just so tiring for young kids. Again, very good skill set in a Western industrialized society to regulate your emotions in that way. And also for a small-scale society, but just in different kind of distributions throughout the day. Interesting. Yeah, no, I I buy that. That that's that's really fascinating, just like how much domination there is of children in in Western societies compared to what you see in hunter-gatherer societies. And like it's no wonder they're they're melting down all the time. Like I I would melt down all the time if I was constantly being bossed around and told what to do by people who are much bigger and stronger than me.

Yeah. You know, yeah there's this um let me remember his name. There's this amazing book by the sociologist in the 80s called Life in a Classroom. So he was this like very kind of test-takey type of psychologist who worked on school sociology. And then he met some primatologists and he was like, Oh, I'm gonna do some observations and see what life is like in the classroom. Uh, Jackson, his name is, and so he wrote this book, and it's like a great um deep dive into the social life of classrooms because his point is basically like it's just self-regulation central. You you never get to finish an activity that you want to finish, right? You're on the teacher's schedule. You have to raise your hand to have basic bodily functions or ask questions.

And one thing that he pointed out, which is really interesting, is like, it's very rare for a teacher to tell you off for doing something wrong, but very common to be told off for breaking a classroom normal norm or rule, right? And like so you also have to control yourself in that way. So presumably, schools are about transmitting specific bits of knowledge, but in practice, it's a lot more about specific norms, especially in terms of managing in classroom in that way. And so you're constantly having to switch on other people's schedules. And it's probably the case. Like, maybe she's not ready to go to bed when you tell her to go to bed. Maybe she just wants to finish playing. But then, like, I'm tired.

I like when I put my kid to bed, it's because I'm tired and I need a break. Not necessarily because he's always ready for it. So, and I need that schedule and I need that time to decompress. So, yeah, again, we're like butting up to a lot of those kind of post industrial schedules, those pesky schedules. How dare they? There's no schedule in a hunter gatherer society. You're right. You follow your whims. Yeah. Cursed by the schedule. Um the pure um pure learning. You you you sort of were like, I'm sorry to to to bring that in, but please, um, what do you want to say about that? So most of my research at so I kind of like accidentally learnt through so when you ask people like who did you learn who do you learn skills from?

People always say, like, my mom, my dad, my mom, my dad taught me these skills. But when you actually observe what kids are doing and who they're interacting with in these communities, like like 75% of the teaching that they're getting and receiving is from other kids of varying ages, but it's happening, you know, kind of horizontally within their age group. And that's really um, and also in play. And so that's really opened up a series of questions that we're now pursuing with my lab and also with like my amazing uh collaborators to really understand how kids are learning from each other and what they're learning from each other and how it works and how it differs across culture. So I don't have many answers yet, unfortunately, because all the research is kind of

active. But one thing that Dorsa Amir and I, who's now at Duke, um, have written about is that maybe what kids are doing and learning from each other isn't actually all that much about what adults think they should learn, but a lot more about kids doing their own thing and that that might actually be part of an adaptive social structure where kids almost act like innovation incubators or startups, right? Like they're these little working things. All they have is free time to figure stuff out. They can work together. They have to adjust to each other's skill set. They have different bodies. So it's not the case that you can just shrink a spear, right? Their strength is different. They're like head.

Why do they all have such big heads? Like they're like right. They're like they're right at doorknob level too right now for both for both Gina and I. Yeah, you and I. Yeah, where they're just constantly hitting doorknobs. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. So all their proportions are different. So they need to kind of adjust the adult world to their benefit. And that involves a lot of innovative thinking. And so if we think about those innovations and what they might do, like they might not matter that much most of the time, but they might really matter when there's a change in the system. And then you need these innovations. You you need a pool of innovations to draw from. And rather than starting from scratch, you can start from what the kids have created

basically. Um, so that's where we're at in our thinking. It's all very it all feels like Disneyland still because you have a theory, you have an idea, and you haven't tested it, and then you like put it to data and it all falls apart, and you're like, Oh, that was so stupid. Why did I think that? But we've we've read enough literature at this point that we are like confident that there's something there is just actually testing the adaptive the the adaptation aspect of it. One one question that is sort of, I mean, there's so much to um to do when you're a kid. One is coordinating, because that cohort is going to be the cohort you'll need to coordinate as adults. So that's one thing that, you know, you're doing now, and that's an investment in the

future, even if kids change, you know, like maybe the maybe the small, weak kid becomes the strongest kid, you know, or maybe the kid who, you know, whatever. Um there's that part. But then another part, then it sounds like, and and you can tell me if this is wrong. Um, but then there's just they're creating their own innovative ways to be socially, or even ways to use the environment, or tools, or artifacts, or of course, linguistically, or social structures, or games, or just almost anything you can think of that could be created. It's not that they're um just sort of trying to be little adults, they're actually their own culture. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. I think like one like thought experiment, especially knowing your research,

David. The David at the top of my screen. One thing we've clarified is I I'll go by Dave. And David And you're both peas too, so I don't know David P it's terrible. Yeah. It's really bad. It's even PI. I'm looking at our names right now. Yeah. So like one thing that um we propose as a thought experiment in an early paper is basically like if you think of like a mobile small like a mobile hunter gather community, right? So you have these communities that are pretty you have a group of like 30 people, so maybe 10 of them or less will be kids and those kids will range from like zero to adulthood, right? So they're a big age range. There's not a lot of room for competitive games. Like, how do you play a game of soccer, like three the three-year-old versus the

17-year-old, right? It's really hard. So, what we often find in these small-scale hunter-gatherer communities is that a lot of the games are a lot more like a test of your own skill and they're or they're very cooperative. Like one of the things the kids in the camp got got into doing at one point was like they would tie this string around all of them and they would run around the camp trying not to break the string, which is like if that's not a cooperative game, like I don't know what is. But what happens when you settle in a bigger setting. So even before a transition to agriculture in the past, you would have had fishing communities that could settle in bigger communities, and all of a sudden you have a

lot more kids, and you might be able to play competitive games. So it's possible that shifts from egalitarian to non-egalitarian social structures could start, for example, with kids playing and bringing up those norms that they develop in their play with their peers into adulthood. And it it would only take a few generations before that becomes the main ethos, right? Like um So, like what kids are doing is is pretty interesting. And I mean, even a more modern example, I was reading a book about the baby boom and how all these kids that did you guys know that the family meeting comes from like an anti uh anti-Soviet kind of like we're a democratic country, we've we were democratic families. Like that's what the idea of a family meeting is, like we make a decision together.

So wait, the the the concept of a family meeting was an act of rebellion against the Soviet Union. That's how it started out. That's where this concept came out. Yeah, we're like an anti kind of like an like we're American, we're democratic in our state, and we're democratic at home kind of thing. So that yeah, that's hilarious. Isn't that hilarious? So so these kids grow up, all of them in these suburbs, right? With loads of same-age kids to the point where for a while there were no teenagers in the suburbs. And then they're also getting these like super democratic values hammered into them at school, hammered into them at home, loads of space to play. And then finally they come up and get to university and they're like, Vietnam War?

that doesn't sound right. Like anti-women attitudes, that's not right either. And so, and then all of them come of age at the same time and lead to this huge groundswell and in culture change throughout, you know, the world, basically. So we we see these themes of like kids coming up and it in under the right conditions, um, bringing norms that were instilled in them or that they developed on their own into their adult lives and leading to kind of bigger changes in culture. So is is the argument then that the parents of the 50s uh worked very hard to instill egalitarian and democratic values into their children? Values that they themselves did not actually hold, that they were just paying lip service

to as a kind of uh political signal of of loyalty to the United States or something like that. But because of all this lip service, they accidentally instilled those values into their children. And then when they come of age, they uh stay true to those values and use them to advocate for social change. Is that is that the basic idea that you're you're proposing that's the argument of the book that I read. Okay, interesting. Um from what we know from studies around demographic change in communities, um, and in how that or at least modeling studies about how demographic change can lead to you know the uh spread of norms that didn't maybe were weren't so popular before. And I think it would make sense that that's what we would see.

And I wouldn't even say it's like parents then like definitely didn't hold true to those values, but the society of the structure, the sorry structure of the society d didn't hold true to those structures, which of course we know because of segregation, the suburbs were key to um kind of segregationist city planning. Um so all of a sudden those structures which are both doing and undoing, right? Um those types of inequalities. It's really interesting because, you know, you think about the claim, it's sort of outside the bounds of psychology because as a researcher, you can't be 200 or 300 years old to, as an adult scientist, look at what a group of kids are growing up in and then see how what they look like as adults, and then maybe how they're raising

their kids. I mean, this is where sort of history has to come in. What a hard thing to study. Um, but it's it's really interesting because i had sort of naively sort of i i think one has a naive thought i will say i i have a naive thought that sort of you know kids they're defenseless they need to be um taken care of and um you know a lot of times the social structure doesn't especially in the US or the UK it's like I was we were talking about earlier, it's not um respecting them the way that, you know, I I would prefer, for example. Um, but at the same time, they're very powerful in the sense of they will be in charge, at least collectively, right? Um, in the future. And I think it's easy to forget that because most adults don't see that.

And if they do, they're just thinking about their kids as adults, and by the time they see it, they're so old. Um, but that's a very different way to think about kids and why we should care about them is because they will actually be in charge even if we're not around to see the consequences. Yeah. I don't know if you got like this will sound like a pivot, but have you guys watched Adolescence on Netflix yet? I I have not. I I we started but we we haven't gotten around to finishing it. So I'm no spoilers, please. Yeah I'm looking forward to spoil we're not done either but like we're like okay we're gonna talk to Emmett about the manosphere like now he's four and a half but he needs to know like you know, like we want to talk to him now about the stuff that's gonna come up as

a teenager because I don't know, those conversations you can't just kind of like like they need to be practiced, right? Like Jerome Lewis, who's a social anthropologist who's been working with the same community as me, but like for many, many, many more years, he talks about this um system of of norms, and it's like a religious system that the Bayaka have. Um, but the way that kids learn it is not like, okay, let's sit down and let me run you through the list. They like hear these food taboos, they see people acting a certain way or not a certain way before they go hunting, they overhear certain people can go hunting or not, why? Because of Aquila is always this word akila. And then they start, as they grow older, start to make sense of all this stuff.

So it's not like this kind of like cut, okay, now you're a teenager. Now we talk about like blood, right? It's like very much a gradual thing that you're always exposed to. And I think that's like kind of where I'm at with all this scary Andrew Tate stuff where I'm like, we start talking about it now. We're like, we start talking about consent now. We start talking about this stuff now, even amongst ourselves, so that those conversations are happening, so that it's not like and all of a sudden we pivot now you're 13 and we talk about this stuff, right? It's like always been part of your life. Is that this so the idea that is that um you don't protect your kids from things that feel like they're too young for, or is that too strong of a way of putting it?

You know, for example, like like some I one one example would be something like death. You know, like there's a philosophy that says, oh no, no, no, grandma is, you know, when to go be with yeah or you know something as opposed to oh no no she's dead and you know like what's happening to her she's decomposing you know like what what what is your thought on that uh continuum from like you know she's playing golf with uh with grandpa or you know there's worms eating her what's the uh w what what's your take given your experience um it's a good question. I mean kids see death all the time there. Barry Hewlett estimates that by the time an Akka kid is 18, 50% of the people they'll have known will have died.

Right. So it they're experiencing death all the time. It's very traumatic for them. Bon Bonnie Hewlett's work on this shows that. Um, they remember people who've died for a long time and they miss them. They see death of animals all the time because obviously they hunt a lot. Um, so death is just part of living there. Um, so definitely in terms of death, like we we've we've had a lot of conversations about like where meat comes from. We went to this like farm shop butcher and they had like a goat, like that they were carving up in it. We were like, okay, look at the bones. Like that's food that we eat. Like, just know that. Sometimes kids then like get really weird about that stuff where they like want to see

loads of death. And then you need to have a conversation about that too. Like, no, it's not something that like we want to happen, like just so we can see it kind of thing. Um, but I can't tell you from a scientific point of view For sure, either way, but I think it's probably always good to be honest with kids, but not so honest that you just scare the life out of them, right? And I think that's the Akila thing. Like they're not a lot of the knowledge that happens in this system of taboos, um a lot of it is initiated when kids are a little bit older, but that doesn't mean it's not being talked about. It doesn't mean they're not exposed to those things in their everyday, also. So more specialized knowledge, more kind of cog, more

ritualized knowledge, you probably would wait until their adolescence, but you lay the groundwork earlier. So it's less of a kind of cut. Okay, now we're in it in this new thing, and more of a gradual joining in. We come back to the joining in of what the community does. Is there anything like as like oh sorry, David, go ahead. So do they have a kind of afterlife story that they tell kids or that they believe in themselves? Or do they say when something's dead, it's dead and it's gone and it's its body is no longer working? Uh what how do they conceptualize this? Yeah, so there's a lot of different conceptions. So people tend to have a shorter mourning period for when kids die because kids are

reincarnated and come back in the same gender body, actually. And then so souls are gendered amongst the bayaka. And then older people tend not to come back. Um, people who are very um kind of selfish um come back as gorillas because gorillas think they're owners of the forest. And also bayaka say that when they die, they come back as these kind of white uh people, which has meant with colonialism that some of their farmer neighbors say, Well, the bayaka say that they come back as like European people. Like, is that true? To which I say, I I don't know what happens when you die, guys. Like, I don't have those types of insight. So, um, very kind of diverse beliefs around death, and a lot of people, I mean, bayaka are

very forthcoming. I'll be like, What happens when you die? And they'll be like, I don't know, haven't been dead yet. Like they're and then some people will have kind of deeper, maybe even be initiated into knowledge that's deeper around what happens around that. Interesting. Cool. Yeah, I just wanted to know what what uh what the story was there. Yeah. Anyway, I interrupted you, Dave. I was just gonna ask, um, you know, the peer learning thing. I remember as a kid loving to hang out with older kids, and we get a chance to do that after school. Um, it's a weird c institution, maybe, or maybe not. You know, you're saying what you're saying about like fishing, where you there is a reason. I mean, the logic of stratifying kids by age makes sense from the perspective of you're

roughly standardizing like what they can do. And so it makes sense to do that. But then the consequences of that, there may be externalities or byproducts that are unintended. Do you think that that's uh a weird not in like the the acronym sense, but just sort of like, is that a really strange artificial thing for our development to really just be around uh really same age mates and not be essentially alloparented or alloparent as kids? Yeah, so I think a few things. I think it is strange how much time kids are spending in single-age classrooms. I think it would be awesome for them to have more opportunities for multi-age learning. Also, just in terms of empathy development, like older kids being able to hang out with

younger kids is really important for their development of like just being nice people, right? I also think that we often over, maybe not over focus, but we focus a little bit more on school and forget that kids tend to have a more diverse friend group in their neighborhood. Um, so we've got like kids, a few households with kids on our street, and like some weekends they're just like going house to house, which is cool. Um, and it's like from three to eight, I think they are. Um, and there's just, you know, five of them, but they have a they have a great time. Um, and we know from you know, research even going back to the 80s, that the neighborhood friend group tends to be a little bit more autonomous and a little bit more diverse.

Then again, you know, very kind of stranger things child autonomy, which I think we are losing a little bit that pesky schedule. We come back to that. Um, but then the other thing I'll say is like in some pastoralist communities, the whole community structured around age sex that you're initiated with and to. And in some communities, the age sect even goes off and makes their own village, and then women marry in. So in some communities, age is really the foundational structure of the entire community. Um, but again, it just it just varies so much in terms of how it's structured and to what degree. I think those age sects aren't like just one-year slices, though. I think it's like a few, like maybe three or four years.

um, but still quite strat stratified by each. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but we David and I had talked previously about field work and sort of um uh David for example it's sounded he had this anecdote of talking to Dan Fessler at UCLA about you know this whole field work thing do I actually have to do it um you know it's really badass that you do field work. Um for you like as a person because we don't do field work um What is your experience of like going back and forth to the field? Like, how do you feel like, you know, as a and now that you're, you know, you started doing this or you know, years ago. And I know people who keep going to the field, some people who don't keep going to the field once they have kids.

Sort of like, how do you think about the field and your your own relationship to it and like how it's changed you? Because we don't, we certainly the people listening, most people probably don't know what that's like. And David and I, you know, we've done things, but not that. So I'm just curious, like, what what you think about that? Yeah, for sure. So I mean, I I won't I won't be like super like heroic and say that my first field season wasn't heard. Like I was so I was so scared, first of all, when we got to this village and like all these people and I didn't know, and everybody was coming to talk to me and didn't understand a word that they were saying. Um this is the Congo Basin. I mean, this is the Congo Basin, right?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. In the Congo Bas. Yeah, I was in Republic of the Congo in the north. So it's a village that's quite remote. So you fly to Brazzaville, you take a very long bus journey to a cap the capital of the north, then you continue over a river, a very long car ride along some logging roads to then get to a boat, and then on the motorboat, you can make it in four hours to the village where I work. So there's no no road. And so we get there and we're like unloading our stuff. I have no idea where we are. I've never been there before. Um I'm French is my mother tongue, but nobody there speaks French. Um, French is the also the national language of Congo. Um, and I get pulled into this group of women who made make me sit with them and now all of

a sudden, like, and like the bayaka are very, they sit very close to each other. So all these people are like entangled with me. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm gonna, I'm gonna die here. And like I got I got I got stuck in pretty quickly. I was I'm lucky that in my undergrad, I'd taken some Swahili courses and so and Bayak is also a Bantu language. So all the words are different, but I knew how the grammar worked. And so I was able to slot in and was able to develop also with the help of another researcher who was there my language skills pretty quickly. Um, but then all of a sudden I was like alone in a f so I also at first I was gonna go work in forest camps. I'm in the village, and I'm like, who's in the forest, guys?

And they're like, Nobody lives in the forest. And I'm like, hmm, all right, well, there goes like my PhD plans. And all of a sudden, like, as I started to know everybody's names, I start hearing names that aren't part of the set that I know. So I'm like, Well, who's this person? And they're like, oh, well, he lives in the forest. I'm like, well, you told me nobody lives in the forest. And they're like, nobody lives in the forest, but he lives in the forest. And all of a sudden, this like mental map of all these kin who are like some are like two, three days. There's one guy who who he's old who lives in the forest full time with his wife. He never comes to the village ever. Like, so there's ecology people that like, because you know they're far away, you know,

they just don't think of them. And I was like, okay, well, can you take me to this camp? So I get to this camp, I get along super well with the host dad. Um, well, the host camp. Now I call him my host dad. Um, and I stayed there for four months, and it was awesome. Except it turns out you can't just bring like rice and beans in mesh bags into the rainforest and they're just gonna be fine. So all my stuff went moldy. All my food went more moldy. All my underwear went moldy like everything you can imagine went moldy. And so I like wasn't gonna eat moldy rice and beans. So I got really really thin and then the camp was breaking up to move further into the forest and I just didn't quite feel well enough.

So I was like I think I'm gonna go home. So I ended up going home a month early then. Planned. And I think it's important to tell those stories because, like, um, but then like the more I went, the more I got used to food, the better my language skills went, the closer friendships I made. Now it really feels like I'm going home. Like I've it's like my other home. I one thing I find really hard about being away from the field is that a a few of my friends have passed away in between um and I'm not there for their funerals. I always send a bit of money to contribute to the um party but um to the funeral ceremony but I'm not there for those things so that's always a little bit difficult. Um but at the same time I always get news when people come to the bigger towns where

there's cell phone reception which is really nice. Um, and yeah, it feels like our our lives are intertwined. You know what I mean? And so it's nice to have that feeling of I have a home away from home and and I hope that they feel as taken care of as I do by them. That's like the main thing. Yeah. So the world sort of the the cost of entry being that difficult, you sort of get a second home or the world shrinks a bit. Yeah, I think so. Think so. And you know, sometimes you might not like get along with people, and that's okay too. If not everybody's made for field work, and that's all right. You can I'm not made for field work. I can see David during the during the moldy beans and rice. I'm just nope nope nope nope nope.

I'm just David David is like, man, I don't like if they get my order wrong at a restaurant. That's that's yeah. I I'm Kvetching if I'm, you know, a few degrees below the optimal temperature or above. Uh yeah. I have I like my daughter. I have lots of s of strongly held arbitrary preferences like my like my daughter. So Okay. That sounds like an inherited crazy. Yeah, maybe that's the solution of the mystery. She knows is there anything we should have asked you? I don't know. Is there anything you should have asked me? You guys tell me. Is there anything else you want to know? Um I think we we covered a lot. It was pretty pretty cool, wide-ranging discussion. Yeah, and I really I I I feel like um what I love about

anthropology is uh it is a window into like our world. And it's such a privileged thing to talk to you and to people who do it. And I hope, like I mean this, it sounds cheesy, but I mean this like sincerely. Like it's, I think it's a really special time and place to be, to be a scientist who sort of you're doing science, but you're also talking to people who ordinarily wouldn't be like part of the conversation. Like we are talking, you know, over we're both in David and I are in California, you're in the UK. Um, but we're talking about these stories from the Congo Basin, and that's because of you, right? And like your your life uh doing that. And I think that's such a um every time I talk to an anthropologist, I I just like want to

express appreciation of like that the fact that you do that is what allows all of us to like understand ourselves better because like we we're all people right and but to see that that part of humanity expressed in that way is like really rewarding and thank you for for bringing that to us um in in dealing with all the hardships that um you you you dealt with to to bring that i mean given give given those hardships you know we have a social norm here uh where we say thank you for your service to military uh uh personnel. Oh my god I know don't thank you can I thank you for your service? I mean like honestly like I think a lot of the all like all of the kudos go to these communities because they don't have to welcome us in, right?

We're like we are such a burden on these communities who make such a mess. We're so bad at everything. They have to take care of us. Um, and the fact that they're willing, they're willing to share their lives with us, they're the the real heroes because like I there's a a story of a group of hunter gatherers who didn't like an anthropologist and they just got up in the middle of the night and moved camp. So I'm just always and left them alone in the bush. So I was just forever grateful that they haven't just abandoned me in the bush alone. So you're just waking up every morning like, okay, okay. They're still here. That's today will be okay. Everybody's still here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you, Bayaka.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, no, thank you so much. Um, thank you, Bayaka. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Bayaka. That's the right move. Yeah. We've reached the end of another episode of Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. David, um, how can people help us out if they'd like? Well, you can leave us a kind review, you can say something nice about us on social media, you can visit our Patreon page and give us a bit of money to support us. Uh, or you can stay tuned for the next episode, which should be coming out next week. Yeah. And David, I'll see you between now and then. Sounds good. Looking forward to it.