This essay in the "anthropology of science" is about how cognition constrains culture in producing science. The example is folk biology, whose cultural recurrence issues from the very same domain-specific cognitive universals that provide the historical backbone of systematic biology. Humans everywhere think about plants and animals in highly structured ways. People have similar folk-biological taxonomies composed of essence-based, species-like groups and the ranking of species into lower- and higher-order groups. Such taxonomies are not as arbitrary in structure and content, nor as variable across cultures, as the assembly of entities into cosmologies, materials, or social groups. These structures are routine products of our "habits of mind," which may in part be naturally selected to grasp relevant and recurrent "habits of the world." An experiment illustrates that the same taxonomic rank is preferred for making biological inferences in two diverse populations: Lowland Maya and Midwest Americans. These findings cannot be explained by domain-general models of similarity because such models cannot account for why both cultures prefer species-like groups, although Americans have relatively little actual knowledge or experience at this level. This supports a modular view of folk biology as a core domain of human knowledge and as a special player, or "core meme," in the selection processes by which cultures evolve. Structural aspects of folk taxonomy provide people in different cultures with the built-in constraints and flexibility that allow them to understand and respond appropriately to different cultural and ecological settings. Another set of reasoning experiments shows that Maya, American folk, and scientists use similarly structured taxonomies in somewhat different ways to extend their understanding of the world in the face of uncertainty. Although folk and scientific taxonomies diverge historically, they continue to interact. The theory of evolution may ultimately dispense with the core concepts of folk biology, including species, taxonomy, and teleology; in practice, however, these may remain indispensable to doing scientific work. Moreover, theory-driven scientific knowledge cannot simply replace folk knowledge in everyday life. Folk-biological knowledge is not driven by implicit or inchoate theories of the sort science aims to make more accurate and perfect.

Folk biology and the anthropology of science: Cognitive universals and cultural particulars

Cooking is a human universal that must have had widespread effects on the nutrition, ecology, and social relationships of the species that invented it The location and timing of its origins are unknown, but it should have left strong signals in the fossil record We suggest that such signals are detectable at ca 19 million years ago in the reduced digestive effort (eg, smaller teeth) and increased supply of food energy (eg, larger female body mass) of early Homo erectus The adoption of cooking required delay of the consumption of food while it was accumulated and/or brought to a processing area, and accumulations of food were valuable and stealable Dominant (eg, larger) individuals (typically male) were therefore able to scrounge from subordinate (eg, smaller) individuals (typically female) instead of relying on their own foraging efforts Because female fitness is limited by access to resources (particularly energetic resources), this dynamic would have favored females able to minimize losse

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/300083

The Raw and the Stolen. Cooking and the Ecology of Human Origins.

s of “Recent Work in Archaeological Geophysics,” Environmental and Industrial Geophysics Group, London, 19 December. Merali, Z. 2006. Dig here for treasures of the ancient world. New Scientist 2561: 30–31. Mills, J. 2005. Bias and the world of the vertical aerial photograph, in K. Brophy and D. Cowley (eds.), From the Air: Understanding Aerial Archaeology, pp. 117–26. Stroud: Tempus. Neubauer, W. 2004. GIS in Archaeology: The interface between prospection and excavation. Archaeological Prospection 11: 159–66. Pasquinucci, M., and Trément, F. (eds.). 2000. NonDestructive Techniques Applied to Landscape Archaeology. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Powlesland, D., Lyall, J., and Donoghue, D. 1997. Enhancing the record through remote sensing: The application and integration of multi-sensor, non-invasive remote sensing techniques for the enhancement of the sites and monuments record.

Handbook of Landscape Archaeology

This study illustrates the potential of small‐game data for identifying and dating Paleolithic demographic pulses such as those associated with modern human origins and the later evolution of food‐producing economies. Archaeofaunal series from Israel and Italy serve as our examples. Three important implications of this study are that (1) early Middle Paleolithic populations were exceptionally small and highly dispersed, (2) the first major population growth pulse in the eastern Mediterranean probably occurred before the end of the Middle Paleolithic, and (3) subsequent demographic pulses in the Upper and Epi‐Paleolithic greatly reshaped the conditions of selection that operated on human subsistence ecology, technology, and society. The findings of this study are consistent with the main premise of Flannery's broad‐spectrum‐revolution hypothesis. However, ranking small prey in terms of work of capture (in the absence of special harvesting tools) proved far more effective in this investigation of human diet...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/300102

The Tortoise and the Hare

There have been many recent observations of trampling and its effect on bone surfaces1–8 as well as some experimental investigation of the process9–14. Although there is known to be a relationship between trampling and scratches on bones, there has been no detailed microscopic comparison with marks made by stone tools. As distinguishing cutmarks from other types of surface features is important in interpreting early hominid behaviour9,14–18 and the entry of humans into the New World7,19–20, we have examined possible mimics caused by trampling in an attempt to define diagnostic criteria for cutmarks. We find that microscopic features alone are not sufficient evidence to distinguish human-generated cutmarks from the results of trampling. We suggest different lines of evidence which together may achieve this goal.

Trampling as a cause of bone surface damage and pseudo-cutmarks

Animals and Archaeology

The harmony of symbols : the Windmill Hill causewayed enclosure, Wiltshire

The craniology and relationships of four species of Bos,: 4. The Relationship between Bos primigenius Boj. and B. taurus L. and its implications for the Phylogeny of the Domestic Breeds

Hunters and their Prey

The craniology and relationships of four species of Bos 5. Bos iudicus L.

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