Throughout history, humans have produced creative solutions to make parenting easier. Today, that might look like smart socks that measure your baby’s vital signs while sleeping or electronic swings that soothe them while you’re trying to get housework done. But the concept of “baby gear” or “parenting technology” has been around for thousands of years—and we see evidence of it across the world.

Indigenous women: Scientists, teachers and inventors 

NHMU’s curator of ethnography, Alexandra Greenwald, studies women’s societal roles, particularly regarding child rearing practices, foraging, preparing, and providing food for their families and communities. This is a vital role that often gets overlooked.

“Everyone is so focused on men, meat and stone tools because bones and stone tools preserve so well in the archaeological record,” said Greenwald, who is also an assistant professor in the U’s Department of Anthropology. “But that doesn’t mean that was the only thing that was happening. Women, and men too, in certain contexts, were experimenting with food safety as they were foraging and cooking plants.”

While the information on what plants were safe to eat, in what quantities, and by which method of preparation was eventually passed down as ancestral knowledge, there was a time when nobody had that information. These women conducted some of the first experiments, learning by trial and error how to keep their families safe and healthy.

“Humans, especially women, have been scientists and mathematicians, experimenting for time immemorial, figuring out their landscape, what is safe, what is not safe,” Greenwald said.

Second, Indigenous communities relied heavily on the resources foraged and prepared by women. For many tribes across the western United States, plant foods formed the core of the diet. The women in these tribes were making trade-offs between their roles as household or community breadwinners and their obligations as mothers. This constant balancing act interested Greenwald, so she began looking at how they were managing to fulfill both roles so seamlessly—and investigating the technology they’d created to make the work more manageable.

Cradle technology helped communities thrive 

After a period of post-partum rest and recovery, Indigenous women needed to get back to helping provide for their families. The problem? Newborn babies slow you down. They’re fragile, hungry all the time, and need constant supervision.

Enter the cradle.

It was perfect. It kept your baby safe and within eyesight while you worked, allowing you to safely set them down wherever you were at. If you needed to move or feed them, you could.

In a study that published earlier this year, Greenwald tested the efficiency of these cradles from a Western science perspective informed by traditional knowledge. She set up an experiment that would measure energy expenditure vs calories collected across three test groups: one foraging without a baby, one foraging with a baby in a sling, and one foraging with a baby in a cradle. (The “baby” in these tests was a 10-pound sandbag in the rough dimensions of a 1–2-month-old infant.) Greenwald hypothesized that women carrying infants in cradles would experience greater foraging efficiency (bringing in the most calories per calorie expended) than women carrying infants in a sling (because they were unencumbered by a baby while gathering).

“Any Indigenous woman who’s had their infant in a cradle could tell you exactly what I’m about to tell you, through traditional knowledge. Traditional ways of knowing and western science ways of knowing are different, but they can arrive at similar, complementary conclusions,” she said. “I want to respectfully apply Western science to Indigenous traditional knowledge about cradles and understand from a behavioral ecological perspective the history and adoption of cradles.”

Gathering acorns and answers 

Guided by input from knowledge keepers from tribal communities across the Western U.S., Greenwald got to work. Test subjects began by fasting, had their base metabolic rates measured, and were hooked up to respirometers, heart rate monitors, accelerometers, and GPS devices. These kept track of their caloric expenditures, as well as giving Greenwald and her team data on how carefully or quickly participants moved.

Every participant was rotated through three test groups (after a rest period) to account for differences in individual foraging skill. Participants were gathering gamble oak acorns in preselected patches to ensure a uniform distribution of acorns that would not bias foraging success.

As expected, the group without a baby gathered the most calories and burned the fewest. If we consider calories as currency, the control group was most “cost effective” and efficient. The group with the baby in the sling gathered the fewest calories and burned the fewest—which was also unsurprising. If you have a fragile infant strapped to your chest, you have to move slowly and cautiously.

But there was a bit of a surprise in the data for the cradle group. This group was extremely efficient, foraging massive amounts of acorns (second only to the group without a baby). But they also burned more calories than the sling carrying group. Once participants set their cradles down, they moved quickly and with purpose—leading to elevated heart rates and more caloric expenditure. And though this finding was surprising at first, it does make sense — any caregiver can relate to trying to get as much done as possible while the baby naps or before they need another feeding.

In the end, the cradle group was the second most efficient at bringing in calories (after the baby-less control group), and despite burning more calories than their sling carrying comparison group, their overall efficiency as foragers was higher.

An act of love and legacy 

Greenwald’s experiment provides data that can help explain why cradle technology spread rapidly through ancient North America, especially in communities where women’s labor was critical to the economy. Even today, urban society has praised “baby backpacks” for giving parents a bit of their independence back. But Native cradle technology also has sacred, personal meaning within Indigenous culture. It is a tradition that brings people together.

In communities where women bring in 70-80% of the family’s food, other family members take time off from foraging to make cradles — allowing the more productive foragers to continue working. It becomes a family endeavor, an act of love that carries on for generations.

“It’s the whole family. It’s mothers, uncles, you know, brothers, sisters,” said Lisa Bullcreek, a member of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute. “We’re all contributing to make that one thing for that one baby or that one person. And that’s our strength. That becomes strength, the love for a family that we’re preparing and making this for. This is a tradition that has been given and passed down to us.”

You can learn more about Greenwald’s research and Indigenous perspective on cradles in the museum’s News from Our Scientists exhibit and see a variety of cradles on display in Native Voices.

Edited for length. Find full story at the Natural History Museum of Utah blog.