Lew-Levy & Amir hypothesize that peer cultures have implications for the evolution and ecological adaptiveness of Homo sapiens. Here, we explore the feasibility of finding evidence of peer cultures in prehistory based on the current state of prehistoric archaeology. Accordingly, we recommend new experimental research with child knappers to improve our ability to infer children’s activities in the archaeological record.

If childhood was critical to cultural adaptation, we would expect to see regular innovation in Homo tool industries. However, the Acheulean, Mousterian, and early H. sapiens industries are remarkably stable. Evidence of prolific innovation is largely absent before the European Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition, which is associated with increased longevity in H. sapiens, suggesting that innovation was sparked by grandparenthood.

Lew-Levy and Amir contend that children are cultural producers in their own right, contributing to cumulative culture through peer culture. We argue that children’s pedagogical contributions extend beyond the social world of peers. Children not only transmit child-relevant knowledge from peer to peer, but also actively share, with children and adults alike, knowledge both that ultimately stemmed from cognitively mature agents.

The authors make an intriguing case that peer cultures could play a key role in cultural adaptation by generating qualitatively different cultural variation compared to adult cultures. However, the mechanisms responsible for this distinction remain unclear. We here discuss how accounting for the role of intrinsic motivation in shaping the content of peer cultures may help explain their evolutionary dynamics.

Lew-Levy and Amir propose that children develop meaningful cultures with the potential to undergird lasting and meaningful societal change. Identifying the domains in which this claim has traction is necessary if we are to accept that there is something special about childhood cultures that transcends considering them as fleeting expressions of an immature life stage.

Lew-Levy and Amir rightly see children’s peer culture as an overlooked engine of human cultural evolution. Researchers who share this view can now take up the burden of proving that the longevity of children’s traditions is indeed comparable to that of adults and of explaining why. The « selection for proliferation » hypothesis suggests a way.

Lew-Levy and Amir’s contribution highlights issues with our current frameworks and methods for understanding the evolution of human behaviour. We fully concur that more attention should be paid to integrating children’s learning into models of cultural evolution and to positioning cultural adaptation in a long-term perspective to better understand the role of children in both the past and the present.

Lew-Levy and Amir highlight contextual variation across both traits and societies in the influence of childhood peer cultures on mainstream adult culture. I suggest that this contextual variation can be explained in part by variable cultural acquisition costs, where some traits (e.g., technology) and societies (e.g., post-industrial) comprise accumulated cultural knowledge that is too costly for children to acquire.

Lew-Levy and Amir argue that the cultural role of human children has been overlooked. Juveniles have been similarly overlooked in research on animal culture. Youngsters are often innovative, and ample opportunities exist for cultural transmission to peers and adults. We review the evidence and argue that the young may be a powerful cultural force in human and nonhuman societies alike.

Lew-Levy and Amir begin to identify mechanisms through which peer interactions can drive cultural change. We highlight an additional important mechanism: peer disagreement. We propose that the egalitarian and learning-oriented nature of peer disagreements prompts children to reflect on the limitations of their knowledge, and to evaluate and integrate competing perspectives, thereby providing fertile ground for the co-creation of new insights.

This brief commentary offers another source of evidence for the arguments made in the target article. The lives of street kids are usually seen as deplorable, as a social blight that must be eradicated. But ethnographic literature can turn this shibboleth on its head. Scholars like the authors have forced us to see the enormous capacity that autonomous children have for acquiring, transmitting, and creating culture. Street kids provide an excellent illustration of this argument.

Lew-Levy and Amir highlight children as agents of cultural adaptation and widespread presence of peer cultures across populations, but their account underestimates peer culture in East Asian societies. Drawing on East Asian contexts, we show how strict family, school, and social structures lead peer culture to take on more covert forms, underscoring the need for broader cross-cultural perspectives.

Language differs from other cultural domains in its high degree of normativity and conventionality; hence, many linguistic innovations by young children are considered acquisition errors that do not diffuse into language communities. Moreover, young children’s cognitive-pragmatic limitations hinder their ability to introduce structure into novel communication systems. Consequently, children are unlikely agents of language change or drivers of language emergence.

Innovation does not occur in all environments. Rather, it is a cultural product of particular socioecological conditions, for example, schooling and commercial activity. Tool innovation is a product of cognitive development. It requires a developmental process that enables concrete cognition around age eight and abstract cognition in the teenage years. These conclusions arise from long-term study of textile production in a Maya community.

Children’s natural curiosity, playfulness, sociability, and future orientation predispose them for cultural adaptation. I exemplify this with Sugata Mitra’s “hole in the wall experiment,” adolescents’ role in the computer revolution, and the likely role of play in children’s development of Nicaraguan Sign Language; and I give an example of juvenile play resulting in cultural innovation in Macaques.

The target paper brings a new dimension to cultural evolution research. The findings it reports are consistent with the hypothesis that it is integrated cognitive networks – i.e., ways of structuring knowledge – that evolve through culture, as opposed to discrete units of cultural knowledge. The impact of child peer groups on cultural evolution could be modeled using methods from network science.

In this commentary I critique individualist biases in developmental and cultural evolutionary science, highlighting the need to study children’s peer cultures as relational and culturally situated. Emphasizing perspectives from the Global South, I call for a genuinely inclusive framework that integrates non-Western developmental theories into the core of cultural evolutionary research.

Children’s peer cultures hold the potential to drive cultural evolution, depending on demography and social transmission pathways. Understanding their interactions can inform cultural-evolutionary theory and promote adaptable cultural institutions. Here, we outline the next steps for theoretical models, clarifying the importance of peer cultures, and introduce sustainable behavior as a compelling test case for children- and youth-driven cultural change.

Lew-Levy and Amir note that by adolescence, children shift from speaking like their parents to using the vernacular of their peers, suggesting that children attend closely to linguistic input from other children. But unlike adult input, peer input has been neglected in research. We believe this is due to methodological limitations that long-form audio recordings are uniquely equipped to overcome.

Greater emphasis on the bidirectionality of peer interaction and cognitive development would complement the suggested framework of children’s contribution to cultural evolution. We outline different aspects/forms of socio-cognitive development to illustrate their roles in cultural processes: social learning, theory of mind, and pretend play. We encourage the consideration of peer cultures in urban settings and the role siblings play.