Rethinking the relationship between studies of ethnobiological knowledge and the evolution of human cultural cognition

Recent projects to reclaim social anthropology for the study of human origins have little to say about cognition of the natural world, while work on the cultural origins of human cognition has paid slight attention to ethnographic data on the organisation of everyday practices. Yet, how early humans organised their knowledge of biota was crucial for certain key adaptations at successive thresholds of evolutionary change. Using comparative work on the perception, engagement and management of biota amongst peoples living in varied environmental and social contexts, and recent theory in psychology, anthropology and ethnobiology, this paper offers a critical review of studies of biological knowledge systems as applied to our understanding of human evolution.