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Clear and present danger Giving children the wrong (or not enough) toys may doom a society Survival is a case of child’s play GIVERS OF EDUCATIONAL gifts, rejoice: despite the eye-rolls you may receive on Christmas morning, you are part of a long and valuable tradition. In cultures around the world, toys have been used to teach children what they need to know about the society they live in. When the toys teach the right skills, the children are prepared for adulthood and thrive. When they do not, calamity beckons. And how. New work led by Mathilde Meyer, a PhD student at Aarhus University in Denmark, and Felix Riede, her supervisor, reveals that giving the wrong toys probably played an important part in dooming the Norse settlers who came to Greenland from Iceland in 985. Greenland was mostly covered in ice when the Norse made the journey, save for a thin strip of fertile land along the coastline where they could farm. The settlers flourished for a few hundred years but, as the world
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