Abstract

In this paper, past plant knowledge serves as a case study to highlight the promise and challenges of interdisciplinary data collection and interpretation in cultural evolution. Plants are central to human life and yet, apart from the role of major crops, people–plant relations have been marginal to the study of culture. Archaeological, linguistic, and historical evidence are often limited when it comes to studying the past role of plants. This is the case in the Nordic countries, where extensive collections of various plant use records are absent until the 1700s. Here, we test if relatively recent ethnobotanical data can be used to trace back ancient plant knowledge in the Nordic countries. Phylogenetic inferences of ancestral states are evaluated against historical, linguistic, and archaeobotanical evidence. The exercise allows us to discuss the opportunities and shortcomings of using phylogenetic comparative methods to study past botanical knowledge. We propose a ‘triangulation method’ that not only combines multiple lines of evidence, but also quantitative and qualitative approaches.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Foundations of cultural evolution’.

Highlights

  • Humans are exceptional at spreading knowledge, materials and technologies across space and time

  • We might expect false positives when plants are widely cultivated, or when aspects of herbal traditions have been written down and profusely shared. Other than these identified cases, phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs) prove to be a very conservative method for estimating past plant uses: we observe that when a plant use is inferred to be ancestral, we find with high certainty that the plant was used in one way or another during the Viking-Age

  • We demonstrated a cultural evolutionary approach to understanding plant use through time in the Nordic regions

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Summary

Introduction

Humans are exceptional at spreading knowledge, materials and technologies across space and time. Phylogenetic approaches to culture are often focused on ‘big picture’ questions [8] about the evolution of e.g. political systems [11], religious beliefs [12] or social structure [13] across multiple millennia; these grand narratives are not connected to the specifics of intra-population cultural transmission To facilitate this connection, we take a ‘mesoevolutionary’ approach [14] that we characterize as (i) multidisciplinary and mutually reinforcing with respect to data sources and methods, (ii) focused on data-rich case studies in a restricted domain, culture area/language family and timespan, ensuring the emic comparability and historical connections of the cultural phenomena and (iii) generating cultural patterns from the bottom up where possible, rather than imposing external categories. This provides a unique opportunity to investigate in what ways ancestral state inference using ethnobotanical data complements the archaeological, historical and linguistic evidence

Methods
PCM ancestral state
Results
Discussion
Conclusion
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