As scholars of childhood in the past and across evolutionary time, we warmly welcome Lew-Levy and Amir’s work as an important, timely, and stimulating contribution to the behavioural sciences. It will doubtlessly generate productive research programmes. Here, we make three points about the consequences of this paper for cultural evolutionary work and our understanding of childhood in the present and past.

Firstly, although the authors do mention material culture, often cultural knowledge and products achieve momentous complexity over time through intergenerational processes of innovation and cultural transmission (Henrich, Reference Henrich2016; Mesoudi & Thornton, Reference Mesoudi and Thornton2018). Moreover, material culture may persist across and transcend generations. Salient contributions in such domains require both the time to master the accumulated knowledge and a level of expertise not available without years of practice, which may begin as play but often requires practice and instruction. It is unclear from the present work what the role of children’s learning and the ensuing peer cultures would be for skills and technology that require intergenerational accumulation and expertise. This is not a shortcoming of the target paper specifically but rather highlights blind spots in cultural evolutionary theory, which so far has not engaged seriously with differences across individuals (but do see Molleman, van den Berg, & Weissing, Reference Molleman, van den Berg and Weissing2014; van den Berg, Van, & Molleman, Reference Van den Berg, Van and Molleman2024) or across the lifespan – in fact, children’s learning has been virtually absent from formal investigations of cultural evolution (but see Deffner & McElreath, Reference Deffner and McElreath2022; Frankenhuis & Panchanathan, Reference Frankenhuis and Panchanathan2011; Kandler, Fogarty, & Karsdorp, Reference Kandler, Fogarty and Karsdorp2023, and our own work Miu et al., Reference Miu, Andersen, Lew-Levy and Riede2025). Moreover, while cultural evolutionary processes require both an understanding of the generation of novelty and its spread, most recent work in cultural evolution has focused exclusively on processes of cultural transmission, with innovation tending to be black-boxed or treated as random, as an error, or as a mutation-like process.

Cultural evolution needs to incorporate theories of creativity and innovation if it is to develop into a mature science of human behaviour that, as it likes to claim, can integrate across levels of explanation. This might require us to focus more on individual-level cognitive processes and to re-integrate the individual into our formal and experimental frameworks designed to study cultural transmission. While these calls to action are not new (Acerbi & Mesoudi, Reference Acerbi and Mesoudi2015; Perry et al., Reference Perry, Carter, Smolla, Akcay, Nöbel, Foster and Healy2020; Singh et al., Reference Singh, Acerbi, Caldwell, Danchin, Isabel, Molleman, Scott-Phillips, Tamariz, Van Den Berg, Van Leeuwen and Derex2021), we suggest that focusing on children and their role in innovation can be a productive place to start. Developmental psychology makes specific claims about learning and exploration strategies that vary across the lifespan (Gopnik, Reference Gopnik2020; Gopnik et al., Reference Gopnik, O’Grady, Lucas, Griffiths, Wente, Bridgers, Aboody, Fung and Dahl2017) that can be readily integrated into our models. Children’s cognitive tendencies to explore broadly might be exactly the type of variation generation process that populations can build on even in the context of intergenerational accumulation in order to achieve better solutions (Miu et al., Reference Miu, Andersen, Lew-Levy and Riede2025). And these cognitive tendencies need to be situated cross-culturally and historically (Muthukrishna, Henrich, & Slingerland, Reference Muthukrishna, Henrich and Slingerland2021).

Second, the paper’s rich behavioural examples are compelling, but from a long-term perspective the minimal focus on materials and material proxies for peer cultures is unfortunate. True longitudinal studies that demonstrate genuine peer-culture longevity will only be possible by integrating a deeper ethno-historical or archaeological perspective (where children are now beginning to be considered seriously; see Meyer & Riede, Reference Meyer and Riede2025; Milks et al., Reference Milks, Lew-Levy, Lavi, Friesem and Reckin2021; Nowell, Reference Nowell2021; Nowell & French, Reference Nowell and French2020; Riede et al., Reference Riede, Walsh, Nowell, Langley and Johannsen2021), which, in turn, is only possible via material proxies. Much work in evolutionary human behavioural sciences, including at times the target article, often assumes rather than demonstrates that behaviour like peer cultures is adaptive, i.e., that it increases the fit between individuals or groups and their environment. This is partly an issue of time scales and partly of data collection – it is nigh impossible to capture true adaptiveness from the type of cross-sectional data typical of ethnographic studies, nor in the absence of considering real ecological changes. This can only be achieved by incorporating truly long-term perspectives and data sources beyond the behavioural sciences (i.e., genetics and the environmental sciences).

Lastly, while the current paper usefully summarises a wealth of evidence on peer cultures across societies, we felt that it lacked a more elaborate discussion on present-day children in Western societies. While it is indeed the case that childhood in these societies looks very different from childhood throughout most human history, there is still considerable variation between childhoods in the West that we expect would have consequences for the evolution of peer cultures. For instance, the US and Denmark differ greatly in terms of child safety and autonomy, the availability of third spaces, and the demographic makeup of children’s social circles, all factors affected by both historical and cultural factors but also by political and social institutions. At the same time, children’s online presence and the emergence of online peer cultures are timely and pressing issues that require more study, especially in the context of our emerging understanding of human behaviour and learning in an increasingly online world (Acerbi, Reference Acerbi2019). Finally, the target article focuses – with understandable passion but perhaps also somewhat unduly so – on the positive and generative aspects of peer culture rather than accounting for the trade-off between cooperation and conflict that has long been a mainstay of adult-focused behavioural science. Such trade-offs are very likely present in child cultures as well. Here, bullying, control, status allocation, and physical violence are as present as camaraderie and play are, and very likely manifest in the online sphere as well. Improving our understanding of the lighter and darker shades of peer cultures in these contexts would have important consequences not just within the academic realm, but also for educational policy, reform, and practice.