Darwin's
18-Wheeler
Written By Mark Cherrington
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Why do boys love trucks so much? An evolutionary inquiry.
Nathaniel is an unusually verbal 3-year-old, a gentle boy who speaks earnestly, as though each word matters and each idea he wants to communicate is vitally important. And most of what he wants to talk about is trucks.
One afternoon not long ago, I sat with Nathaniel in his living room, where he explained how one of his trucks worked. "It's a front loader," he said. "But this one is special: It's an articulated front loader." He emphasized the technical term and pointed out how the truck bent in the middle, as though I, a layman, might not have known about this particular detail of construction equipment. (I didn't, in fact, but my pride as a man wouldn't let me admit it.) Then he showed me one of his backhoes. "See," he said, "the stabilizers even work!"
Next Nathaniel proceeded to pull out all his trucks. Soon the living room and dining room floors were crammed with maybe 50 vehicles, from a 2-inch-long city bus to a crane almost as big as Nathaniel himself. There were dump trucks and bulldozers, garbage trucks and tractor-trailers, and specialized vehicles for digging holes, crushing concrete, and dozens of other more esoteric tasks.
When his mom takes him on errands, Nathaniel insists they stop by local construction sites, where he'll watch the trucks for hours. He's such a regular that the workers call him by name and stop to chat about the steamrollers and Bobcats. So immersed is he in this world that if his parents call for him and he doesn't want to go, he won't say no. Instead, he'll back away issuing a loud, high-pitched "beep ... beep ... beep ... beep."
The degree of Nathaniel's interest may be unusual, but the nature of it is absolutely typical. Trucks are the universal boy toy. Tonka alone has sold 250 million worldwide since it was founded in 1947. In virtually every country you'll find boys vroom-vrooming around some sort of vehicle. A few years ago I was in a rural village in Zimbabwe where there were no cars, but the village boys had bent wire into elaborate, working models of jalopies they'd likely seen only a few times. (Similar creations, found elsewhere in Africa, are called galimoto, which means "car" in Chichewa, the national language of Malawi.)
This fascination with transport toys seems to stretch across time as well as space. At Mayan sites in Mexico, archaeologists have excavated dozens of what appear to be toys, ceramic objects with axles and wheels dating from around 1,500 years ago. There's no evidence Mayans used wheeled vehicles at all except in these toys — they had no animals that could pull a wagon. The archaeologists didn't say the toys were used primarily by boys, but I'd bet my Sears Craftsman tool kit on it.
Next page: Is it nature or nurture when a boy picks up a truck?
