Multispecies Didactics: Histories of Animal-Mediated Environmental Learning

How humans have come to know and live in their environments and how such knowledge is accrued and deployed has not only gained novel significance in an age of deepening ecological crisis but also broaches a key question for the historical sciences. Critically engaging this long-standing issue, this article draws attention to fundamentally overlooked more-than-human contexts of environmental knowledge-making. We suggest that studying processes of human environmental learning from a multispecies perspective holds great potential to transform our understanding of past human-environment relationships. We begin with an outline of the deeply entrenched anthropocentrism that has shaped concepts of knowledge and learning in the European(-derived) tradition. We then develop an integrated framework to facilitate interdisciplinary investigations into the interspecies dimension of human environmental learning in the form of a tripartite heuristic of learning through, learning from and learning with other animals. We discuss – with particular emphasis on the third and most complex modality – how this scheme can promote new insights into how past humans and other animals have inspired each other to act and dwell in shared landscapes, with lasting consequences for broader historical trajectories including material culture, cognition and discourse. Since such interspecies dynamics have rarely been addressed in historical scholarship, the article draws together a range of examples and contexts in which learning with other animals appears to have been a history-shaping dynamic, comprising such variegated societies as Pleistocene and early Holocene North European foragers, Indigenous Arctic foragers and North American Plains horse pastoralists as well as mid- and late Holocene agriculturalists and colonial livestock herders. Based on these explorations of human environmental learning, we suggest that interspecies learning mechanisms provide a multispecies analog of lateral gene transfer for more-than-human history and multispecies archaeology, can help us integrate human history into animal history and the broader history of the biosphere, and holds implications for future-making conversations on reimagining our life with other earthlings.