Terra Sapiens. How Landscape Invented Man by Matteo Meschiari (University of Palermo, Italy) Abstract: By proposing an extended use of the term Folkecology to designate the ecological knowledge and competences among the hunter-gatherers and in some traditional societies, this essay poses the methodological basis to create a landscape model of the human mind and cognitive processes. 1. Present Pleistocene The idea of landscape was not born with Petrarch on Mount Ventoux or during the Renaissance with Flemish painters, just as Henry Ford and Armand Peugeot did not invent the wheel. Landscape as a symbolic form is, rather, an innate way of thinking, an intertwining of cerebral and cognitive structures shaped over the course of hundreds of millennia by the sensory experiences of hominids and Homo sapiens sapiens in their respective ecosystems. Some researchers prefer in this case to talk about proto-landscape (Berque 1995), or simply environment, territory or ecosystem, reserving the term landscape for the intentional and strictly cultural prerogative that characterizes the human-nature relationship. But to avoid from the outset the “false opposition between nature and culture, source of pernicious misunderstandings”, it must be observed that “the difference between transformed objective reality [culture] and untransformed objective reality [nature] is debatable; even untransformed objective reality, insofar as it is experienced, thus represented, is the product of a transformation” (Buttitta 1996: 16). In other words, when perceived by humans, the land is already a representation, and moving from synchrony to diachrony, we can assert that the idea of landscape has existed at least since Homo sapiens sapiens made his appearance. To neglect this long-term perspective in a discussion about landscape would be to misunderstand the fundamental phenomena that control our way of relating to the environment. Paleoecology, geology, primatology, physical anthropology, sociobiology, cognitive ecology, paleoethnology, comparative ethnology and ethnolinguistics all help us to reconstruct the historical context (phylogenetic, ontogenetic and cultural) of the co-evolution of humans and the environment. The idea is to look for the biological and cultural background in every statement about the environment, because reconstructing our ecological prehistory means understanding that modern man, before a panorama, is not only a Homo aestheticus of refined intellectual options, but also the unknowing heir to a wealth of innate cognitive structures that date back to the Pleistocene, and that show vital traces of the neurophysiological and symbolic particularities of the 1