The doll is one of the oldest and most universal of all human artefacts. Carved, modelled, stitched, or cast figures representing the human form have been found in archaeological sites on every inhabited continent, ranging in date from the Upper Palaeolithic period to the present. Their universality across time and cultures suggests that they respond to something deep in human psychology — an attraction to miniaturised human forms that may be related to the same cognitive systems that underlie empathy, social learning, and the imaginative projection of mental states onto inanimate objects. Yet the specific meanings and functions of dolls have varied enormously across different cultural and historical contexts, and the assumption that dolls have always been children's toys is not supported by the historical record.

The oldest known dolls — simple clay and ivory figures found in ancient Egyptian tombs and in archaeological sites from ancient Greece — were almost certainly not children's playthings but ritual or religious objects. They may have served as votive offerings, as representations of the deceased or of protective spirits, or as objects used in fertility and healing ceremonies. The custom of placing figures in tombs continued across many ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures, and in some traditions — notably ancient China and ancient Japan — the practice of placing human-shaped substitutes in burial sites was understood to provide the deceased with servants and companions in the afterlife. The shift from sacred object to child's plaything may have been gradual and may never have been complete, with the same type of figure serving both functions in different contexts.

By the classical period in Greece and Rome, there is clear evidence of dolls as children's toys. Greek and Roman dolls — made from terracotta, ivory, bone, and fabric — were jointed to allow their limbs to be manipulated and were sometimes accompanied by miniature domestic objects, clothes, and furniture that suggest they were used in imaginative domestic play. Literary and inscriptional evidence from the classical world indicates that dolls were among the most commonly given gifts to girls, and that it was conventional for a girl to dedicate her dolls to a goddess at the threshold of marriage as a symbolic farewell to childhood. This custom is described in several poems and inscriptions and provides one of the clearest indications that classical dolls were understood as specifically childhood objects.

The European doll-making industry that developed from the thirteenth century onwards in the craft centres of Nuremberg and Sonneberg in Germany became the dominant source of dolls for the European market and eventually for much of the world. German craft guilds developed sophisticated manufacturing techniques — using turned wood, moulded papier-mache, wax, and eventually bisque porcelain for doll heads — and exported their products across Europe and the Americas. The fashion doll — a large, expensively dressed figure used to display the latest clothing styles from Paris, sent to dressmakers and wealthy clients across Europe before the development of fashion magazines — represents an interesting example of a doll form that served an entirely adult commercial function.

The industrialisation of doll production in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed what had been a craft industry into mass production, making commercially produced dolls accessible to children across the income spectrum rather than only to the affluent. Celluloid, composition, hard plastic, and eventually soft vinyl replaced the earlier craft materials, and the development of moveable features — opening and closing eyes, crying and laughing mechanisms, and later electronic responses — extended the range of interactions that a doll could offer. The launch of the Barbie doll by Mattel in 1959 represented a significant departure from the tradition of baby and child dolls: Barbie was explicitly an adult figure with fashionable clothes and accessories, positioning the doll as a vehicle for aspirational play about adult roles rather than nurturing play with a child figure.

Dolls continue to be debated as cultural objects in contemporary societies. Concerns about the body image messages conveyed by dolls with exaggeratedly thin or stylised physiques have been raised by parents, educators, and psychologists, and have prompted some manufacturers to introduce more anatomically realistic alternatives. The representation of racial and cultural diversity in commercial doll ranges has been an ongoing area of criticism and reform. And the emergence of highly realistic 'reborn' dolls — silicone baby figures intended primarily for adult collectors rather than children — has raised questions about the psychological functions that dolls continue to serve in adult life, and about the continuity between ancient ritual figures and their modern descendants.