55 traditional cultures: Experts with observable motor skills like toolmaking were often generous teachers, but specialists with conceptual know-how for uncommon problems (health) used secretive knowledge to help clients

Ethnoscientific expertise and knowledge specialisation in 55 traditional cultures. Aaron D. Lightner, Cynthiann Heckelsmiller and Edward H. Hagen. Evolutionary Human Sciences, accepted manuscript, pp. 1 - 52, Jun 14 2021. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2021.31

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. transmitted knowledge depended on the domain of expertise. Specifically, medicinal knowledge was positively associated with secretive and specialised knowledge for resolving uncommon and serious problems, i.e., proprietary knowledge. Motor skill-related expertise, such as subsistence and technological skills, was positively associated with broadly competent and generous teachers, i.e., cultural transmission. We also found that collaborative expertise was central to both of these models, and was generally important across different knowledge and skill domains.

Social media summary: In a cross-cultural study we found that experts with observable motor skills like toolmaking were often teachers, but specialists with conceptual know-how for uncommon problems like illness used secretive knowledge to help clients.

Keywords: Ethnoscience, Expertise, Cultural transmission, Conceptual knowledge, eHRAF