Be Excellent To Each Other

Who invented toys?

Children I suspect. Anything is a toy to them - this twig here, it's a hunter, this rock, it's a wolf...

FTFY.

Which reminds me of the hilarious story on B3TA I read a week or so ago about 2 kids playing A Team in their garden. The kid playing Face did a roll and fell into a sceptic tank open for inspection. He did literally eat shit.

That's where I started with this. Clearly kids have always played, right back to the grunting ones in caves*, and have entertained themselves with whatever's to hand. So when did toys as a distinct object come about, and whose idea was it? As they clearly weren't needed. Or were a lot of cro-magnon children going "ugg urr UG UGGG"**, until their parents got fed up and made them a HotWheels track?



*I'm not talking about Newcastle

*"but mum I'M BORRRRRED"

I do know that china dolls, puppets, music boxes and animatronics were invented by adults for adults as party pieces - That started around the restoration period. Children would be allowed to watch but not play with them until much much later as they were hideously expensive until the industrial revolution allowed mass production.


edit: to answer your question exactly the spinning top is the earliest recorded toy. You find them in every culture throughout time.

From Wiki:


Hmm, so their toys were, really, childrens' version of the things they'd be doing when they became adults. still, I guess that holds true for many toys today.




Jesus christ, can you imagine doing that now? "Noooooo! Not the XBoX!" "son, it burns or you don't get driving lessons"

I find it fascinating how some of the earliest toys kids like playing with involve basically pretending to be mums and dad's themselves - and if Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek kids had dolls, this is something that's been true all throughout history.

Certainly the ex bought Zioette a play kitchen for her birthday and she absolutely loves it. I'm slightly concerned about her culinary skills though. Last night I went round there and the first thing she said to me was "Daddy, bit hungry? Want dinner?". She then asked what I'd like to eat "Chicken? Vegetables? Ketchup? Sauce?" (I'm guessing ketchup and sauce are not the same thing). She then went off for a bit, before coming back, shouting "SURPRISE!" and handing me a plastic plate with a plastic steak, a plastic turnip and a plastic fried egg on it.

Bah, kids don't need toys. They need workhouses and coal mines!

I suspect this is because kids are emulating the world around them, the world around them being their parents.

And what's wrong with steak, egg and turnip?

Yes. A lot of play is development towards adulthood. I think it's hardwired into kids to do this.

That does rather raise the question of whether Roman children would, if given access to a load of Playmobil, suddenly start pretending a lonely scorpion's farm was being attacked by a horde of flying space monkeys (actual game First Born was playing recently. All of 4 years old). Do the more 'imaginative' toys available today mean that kids are more likely to have fantastical games, or would the Greek kids have been pretending that they were being abducted by moon monsters?

Greek kids had fantastical stories to base their play on too.

yeah, I was thinking of that when I wrote it, but their fantastical stories weren't fantastical to them, they thought they were all true, innit.

*Drops GI Jesus*

Their fantastic stories consisted of a rational world where natural occurrences could be explained without supernatural intervention. Adult Greeks used to laugh at their kids and their crazy stories of a world were Olympus was just a mountain!

That's not strictly true. edit: at kissyfur

One of the great literary trends thought time is this:
The author creates a fiction story as fact, the readers/listeners know this, the author knows they know. Neither ever says that it's fiction. Another author would then take this story and add more to it.

You see it in Egypt, Greece, ancient Rome, the holy grail stories, religion and on and on. That's not to say that some books were not based on fact, of course the clever story tellers would add in local history or changes names/species and so on - it's a fair bet that "zeus" was in fact "the cobbler" and the "swan" was the "farmer's daughter". Storytelling (even in Greece) wasn't like a church service today, you were not forced to sit down and listen, you better make that shit funny/interesting/shocking or you got no audience.

It ticks me off that this is glossed over in the national curriculum, this is the reason people use medieval literature to hunt the grail while the 43 people who made that shit up look down upon them laughing there arses off and giving each other high fives.