Exploring Environmental Influences on Infant Development and Their Potential Role in Processes of Cultural Transmission and Long-Term Technological Change

Emerging understanding of the extent to which the childhood environment can influence long-term neural and cognitive development may justify greater attention to its role in prehistory. In this review, we attempt to identify a range of ways in which changes to the rearing environment might impact on cognitive function with the potential to modify processes of cultural transmission. We focus on the types of change to the infant environment that may arise when moving from mobile hunter-gather to more settled agrarian lifeways. We consider the evidence for such early environmental factors bringing about enduring effects on perceptual tuning, shared attention, behavioural regulation and observational learning, and how these might contribute to differences in processes of cultural transmission across lifeways. We conclude that the potential developmental significance of cultural changes to the infant environment suggests more attention should be paid by archaeologists to lines of evidence related to early childhood environments in prehistory.