As I type these words, my son and daughter are aged eight and six years old respectively.They’re running around the garden, screaming and laughing and pretending to be various animals – a cat, a dog, a dragon – while I try to focus on the crawl of type across my screen. In what ways are, and aren’t, they like the first of our ancient ancestors to tread this ground?
The clothes my children are wearing; the (relative) cleanness of their skins; the language they’re speaking: all of these things are specific to the present. Yet, if I had somehow been handed two newborn late-Palaeolithic babies to adopt, they would happily have mastered everything my children have done.
