Dangerous, but not quite as dangerous as the neotropical rainforest, are the Kalahari Desert, the Arctic, and the swamps of the Okavango Delta. !Kung children play in groups that are supervised casually but effectively by adults; the children are usually within eye or ear contact of adults in camp. In the Arctic one cannot allow children to run around freely, because of dangers from accidents that would result in exposure or freezing. Young girls in Southern Africa’s Okavango Delta are permitted to catch fish with baskets, but they stay near shore because of danger from crocodiles, hippopotamuses, elephants, and buffaloes. These examples should be tempered, however, by mentioning that 4-year-old Aka Pygmy children, while they don’t go off into the Central African rainforest by themselves, do go off with 10-year-old Aka children despite the dangers of leopards and elephants.
A less dangerous environment, where children can be given more freedom, is that of the Hadza in East Africa. It has leopards and other dangerous predators, as does the environment of the !Kung, but it differs from the !Kung environment in being hilly, so that it is possible to see greater distances, and parents can keep an eye on children playing at greater distances from a Hadza camp than from a !Kung camp. The New Guinea rainforests are also moderately safe: there are no dangerous mammals, many snakes are poisonous but they are rarely encountered, and the main danger is from other people. Hence I often see New Guinea children playing, walking, or canoeing by themselves, and my New Guinea friends tell me of spending much time in the forests by themselves as children.
Among the safest environments are Australia’s deserts and Madagascar’s forests. In recent times Australian deserts have harbored no mammals dangerous to humans. Like New Guinea, Australia has a reputation for poisonous snakes, but one rarely comes across them unless one goes looking for them. Hence Martu children in the Australian desert regularly go out on foraging trips unsupervised by adults. Similarly, Madagascar’s forests harbor no large predators and few poisonous plants and animals, so children can safely go off by themselves in groups to dig yams.
Multi-age playgroups
On the American frontier, where population was sparse, the one-room schoolhouse was a common phenomenon. With so few children living within daily travel distance, schools could afford only a single room and a single teacher, and all children of different ages had to be educated together in that one room. But the one-room schoolhouse in the U.S. today is a romantic memory of the past, except in rural areas of low population density. Instead, in all cities, and in rural areas of moderate population density, children learn and play in age cohorts. School classrooms are age-graded, such that most classmates are within a year of each other in age. While neighborhood playgroups are not so strictly age-segregated, in densely populated areas of large societies there are enough children living within walking distance of each other that 12-year-olds don’t routinely play with 3-year-olds. That norm of age cohorts applies not only to modern societies with state governments and schools, but also to populous pre-state societies, because of the same basic demographic fact: many children close in age, living in proximity. For example, many African chiefdoms have or had age cohorts, in which children close in age were initiated and circumcised at the same time, and (among the Zulu) boys of the same age formed military cohorts.
But demographic realities produce a different result in small-scale societies, which resemble one-room schoolhouses. A typical hunter-gatherer band numbering around 30 people will on the average contain only about a dozen pre-adolescent kids, of both sexes and various ages. Hence it is impossible to assemble separate age-cohort playgroups, each with many children, as is characteristic of large societies. Instead, all children in the band form a single multi-age playgroup of both sexes. That observation applies to all small-scale hunter-gatherer societies that have been studied.
In such multi-age playgroups, both the older and the younger children gain from being together. The young children gain from being socialized not only by adults by also by older children, while the older children acquire experience in caring for younger children. That experience gained by older children contributes to explaining how hunter-gatherers can become confident parents already as teen-agers. While Western societies have plenty of teen-aged parents, especially unwed teen-agers, Western teen-agers are suboptimal parents because of inexperience. However, in a small-scale society, the teen-agers who become parents will already have been taking care of children for many years (Plate 38).
For example, while I was spending some time in a remote New Guinea village, a 12-year-old girl named Morcy was designated to cook for me. When I returned to the village two years later, I found that Morcy had gotten married in the intervening time and was now, at the age of 14, holding her first child. I at first thought: surely there is a mistake about her age, and she really is 16 or 17? But Morcy’s father was the man who kept the village birth and death record book, and he had recorded her date of birth himself. I then thought: how on earth can a girl only 14 years old be a competent mother? In the United States, it would even be forbidden by law for a man to marry such a young girl. But Morcy seemed to be dealing in a self-assured way with her child, no differently from older mothers at the village. I finally reflected that Morcy had already had years of experience in taking care of young children. At age 14, she was better qualified to be a parent than I had been when I became a father at age 49.
Another phenomenon affected by multi-age playgroups is premarital sex, which is reported from all well-studied small hunter-gatherer societies. Most large societies consider some activities as suitable for boys, and other activities as suitable for girls. They encourage boys and girls to play separately, and there are enough boys and girls to form single-sex playgroups. But that’s impossible in a band where there are only a dozen children of all ages. Because hunter-gatherer children sleep with their parents, either in the same bed or in the same hut, there is no privacy. Children see their parents having sex. In the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski was told that parents took no special precautions to prevent their children from watching them having sex: they just scolded the child and told it to cover its head with a mat. Once children are old enough to join playgroups of other children, they make up games imitating the various adult activities that they see, so of course they have sex games, simulating intercourse. Either the adults don’t interfere with child sex play at all, or else !Kung parents discourage it when it becomes obvious, but they consider child sexual experimentation inevitable and normal. It’s what the !Kung parents themselves did as children, and the children are often playing out of sight where the parents don’t see their sex games. Many societies, such as the Siriono and Piraha and New Guinea Eastern Highlanders, tolerate open sexual play between adults and children.