In evolutionary thinking, species evolve by adapting to a given environment. This model of adaptation fits only partially in the case of the hominin lineage. We are able to adapt to the most shifting natural circumstances, and, in addition, we transform the world we inhabit by designing our environments. At the core of these capacities of innovation and adaptation is the talent for learning and accumulation of know-how that characterizes Homo Sapiens (and our predecessors). This chapter addresses the issue of how to conceive of learning and development during ontogeny in complex societies with a special focus on age and ageing. The argument is that scholarly interpretations of learning and development have been constrained by a Darwinian interpretation of adaptation, construing learning/development as processes that characterize the early phases of life and that imply adaptation to a given world. What is specific about humans, though, is our capacity for intergenerational, social and cultural learning, which makes it possible to learn from each other and to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances that nowadays occur even during a single generation. In the case of social and cultural learning, issues of age and ageing are ambiguous and generally less relevant as explanatory factors.