ABSTRACT
Play is often about learning how to survive, except you do not know that while you are actually doing it. Children build dens, cook, hunt, track, hide and develop all of the other skills which make survival possible. Sometimes they go to incredibly sophisticated lengths to create homes for themselves. This reflection is concerned with three play types – mastery, deep and social. It also demonstrates the power of recapitulation, when children are driven by their ancestral past to engage in complex behaviour that has little current purpose save that of developing motor skills.
