Abstract/Summary

The deep time record indicates that hunting played a key role in human evolution, including in the development of the life history of humans. The archaeological record preserves many different avenues for understanding early hunting including hunting gear, butchered prey, and art. As a complex skill, hunting likely involved a long learning period to develop competencies. While rare, there are some exceptional circumstances in which the toys and tools with which children and adolescents learned to hunt have preserved. In many cases though, we rely on ethnographic data to fill in gaps in understanding past children’s tangible and intangible culture of hunting, including how they developed skills which would have allowed them and their communities to survive and thrive. This paper reviews the relevant archaeological and ethnographic records of the hunting activities of forager children and adolescents, and explores areas where we see commonalities as well as divergences in these data. Ethnographies provide ‘real world’ data that can fill in intangible aspects of the deep past, while the archaeological record has its own unique stories to tell.