Ethnoscientific expertise and knowledge specialisation in 55 traditional cultures.

ABSTRACT: People everywhere acquire high levels of conceptual knowledge about their social and natural worlds, which we refer to as ethnoscientific expertise. Evolutionary explanations for expertise are still widely debated. We analysed ethnographic text records (N = 547) describing ethnoscientific expertise among 55 cultures in the Human Relations Area Files to investigate the mutually compatible roles of collaboration, proprietary knowledge, cultural transmission, honest signalling, and mate provisioning. We found relatively high levels of evidence for collaboration, proprietary knowledge, and cultural transmission, and lower levels of evidence for honest signalling and mate provisioning. In our exploratory analyses, we found that whether expertise involved proprietary vs. transmitte

SUBMITTER: Lightner AD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10427309 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature