[Paper spotlight] A roadmap to doing culturally grounded developmental science

This terrific new paper, published in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, provides a roadmap for cross-cultural developmental research, with a focus on inclusive and ethical research practices.

Abstract:

This paper provides a roadmap for engaging in cross-cultural, developmental research in practical, ethical, and community-engaged ways. To cultivate the flexibility necessary for conducting cross-cultural research, we structure our roadmap as a series of questions that each research program might consider prior to embarking on cross-cultural examinations in developmental science. Within each topic, we focus on the challenges and opportunities inherent to different types of study designs, fieldwork, and collaborations because our collective experience in conducting research in multiple cultural contexts has taught us that there can be no single “best practice”. Here we identify the challenges that are unique to cross-cultural research as well as present a series of recommendations and guidelines. We also bring to the forefront ethical considerations which are rarely encountered in the laboratory context, but which researchers face daily while conducting research in a cultural context which one is not a member. As each research context requires unique solutions to these recurring challenges, we urge researchers to use this set of questions as a starting point, and to expand and tailor the questions and potential solutions with community members to support their own research design or cultural context. This will allow us to move the field towards more inclusive and ethical research practices.

CBC: Why it's important to learn how children lived in the last ice age

"The children who lived more than 10,000 years ago have been historically understudied even though they're pivotal for our collective understanding of the species, according to researcher April Nowell.

"If children represented anywhere between a half to two-thirds of the population during the paleolithic, then in order to understand the lives of our ancestors, we need to also understand the lives of these children," Nowell, a paleolithic archeologist at the University of Victoria told CBC Radio's Ideas.

Nowell, author of Growing Up in the Ice Age, has spent decades piecing together the past with only hints of evidence left by people just minding their own business at the tail end of the last ice age around 15,000 years ago, when wooly mammoths roamed the countryside.

She's one of a growing number of researchers working to change longstanding biases that have led to children being understudied compared to their adult counterparts."

Continue reading on CBC, with quotes from our very own Sheina Lew-Levy.

[Paper spotlight] Social ties in the Congo Basin: insights into tropical forest adaptation

Check out this new review in Phil B from FCS members Adam Boyette, Sheina Lew-Levy and colleagues of genetic, palaeoclimatological, linguistic and historical data on the peopling of the Congo Basin.

Abstract:

Investigating past and present human adaptation to the Congo Basin tropi- cal forest can shed light on how climate and ecosystem variability have shaped human evolution. Here, we first review and synthesize genetic, palaeoclimatological, linguistic and historical data on the peopling of the Congo Basin. While forest fragmentation led to the increased genetic and geographical divergence of forest foragers, these groups maintained long- distance connectivity. The eventual expansion of Bantu speakers into the Congo Basin provided new opportunities for forging inter-group links, as evidenced by linguistic shifts and historical accounts. Building from our ethnographic work in the northern Republic of the Congo, we show how these inter-group links between forest forager communities as well as trade relationships with neighbouring farmers facilitate adaptation to eco- regions through knowledge exchange. While researchers tend to emphasize forager–farmer interactions that began in the Iron Age, we argue that foragers’ cultivation of relational wealth with groups across the region played a major role in the initial occupation of the Congo Basin and, consequently, in cultural evolution among the ancestors of contemporary peoples.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Tropical forests in the deep human past’.