OPINION: Imitation and imagination: child’s play is central to human success
Children's desire to copy adults when they're playing may explain why humans have continued to advance society from generation to generation. Image: pick-uppath/iStockphoto We all know the scene: a child, wrapped in his or her own imaginary world, fights off aliens while flying through space on a rocket fashioned from an empty box. But could such flights of fancy be critical to humanity as we know it? I published a paper earlier this week in the Journal of Comparative Psychology where I argue that the emergence of childhood (which I would broadly define as between two and seven years old) as a life stage may have been an important step. Here’s why. Since the split from our common ancestor, the chimpanzee, seven million years ago, we have colonised more of the planet’s terrestrial habitat than any other species and account for about eight times as much biomass as all other terrestrial vertebrates combined. Chimpanzees, by...