It is estimated that in prehistoric societies children made up between 40 to 65 percent of the population, yet by default, our ancestral landscapes are peopled by adults who hunt, gather, fish, use tools, and make art. But these busy adults had to make space physically, emotionally, intellectually, and cognitively for the infants, children, and adolescents around them. 

Until recently the economic, social, and political roles of Paleolithic children were often understudied because they were assumed to be unknowable or negligible. Utilizing evidence from the tiniest deciduous teeth in South Africa to richly adorned burials in Russia, April Nowell, a paleolithic archaeologist and professor of anthropology, draws on recent data from the cognitive sciences and ethnographic, fossil, archaeological, and primate records to challenge these assumptions. Rendering the “invisible” children visible opens a new understanding of the contributions children have made to the biological and cultural entities we are today.

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