Format: ORAL

Fiona M. Jordan1 Julie Hawkins2 Jamie Thompson3

1. Anthropology & Archaeology, University of Bristol, UK 2. Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Reading, UK 3. Life Sciences, University of Bath, UK

Evolutionary approaches to human culture and language are now commonplace in anthropology, including the use of comparative phylogenetic methods to understand cultural macroevolution. Using linguistic phylogenies to model human population history, it is possible to infer the dynamics of change in ethnographic, archaeological, material, linguistic and cognitive phenomena. Ancestral features of cultural groups can be estimated, and both transformational sequences of change as well as coevolutionary hypotheses about culture and environment can be robustly tested while accounting for historical autocorrelation between populations. Language families spanning the globe and human lifeways are now represented by computationally inferred language phylogenies, and the maturity of the field has accelerated with large-scale cross-cultural databases and data collection surveys. To further promote ethnobotanical research in this arena, we present a selection of key studies that investigate botanical resource use. Our recent study of Polynesian medicinal plant traditions explores the roles for adaptation and ancestral knowledge in plant-based healthcare at pre-historic timescales. We test the extent to which (a) the new floristic environments encountered, (b) cultural ancestry or (c) geographic proximity predict the composition of ethnopharmacopoeias in seven Oceanic ethnolinguistic groups. This small study highlights the need for large-scale ethnobotanic databases in order to progress future work, while highlighting the challenges of collating and synthesising TEK in ways that are sensitive to the CARE principles of indigenous data management.