> He ran around the backyard using sticks as guns.
Since sticks (in nature) have none of the function of guns, this is certainly a learned behaviour from social observation.
Since sticks (in nature) have none of the function of guns, this is certainly a learned behaviour from social observation.
> Since sticks (in nature) have none of the function of guns, this is certainly a learned behaviour from social observation.
Certainly part of it, but I'd bet if you gave the girl a stick to play with, she'd probably start doing something like pretending it was a baby. The specific behaviors are learned, but the preferences may not be.
I suspect that if you manged to raise some boys and girls a a completely gender neutral environment without those social influences, they'd spontaneously invent primitive and somewhat disorganized versions of the same behaviors (sort of like with language, e.g. a critical mass of deaf children will spontaneously invent a sign language together if they're not taught one).
Girls treat the outdoors generally the same as boys do, and iirc are recorded climbing trees in the same numbers.
IMHO, this ends the argument.
You're gonna therefore have to explain to me why you think this is natural behaviour. Since, as I understand, trucks were invented by humans.
Isn't it just that chimpanzees are social and have been cued by human expectations, their captors and immediate relatives?
In communist Romania of my youth, where toys were sparse.
In Egypt nowadays, in poor families who can't pay for toys.
Do you have children?
Given that this behaviour was learned by observation, society's existing gender norms - and specifically those around guns - would also have been observed and learned. We can't separate these, in this anecdote.
Would we not expect to observe the son to engage with more caring play if the stay-at-home parent (primary carer) had been the dad?