by Hugh M. Lewis

Models of proto-culture, based upon primary cultural development within natural and non-culturally mediated environments, are developed in relation to a fundamentally human evolutionary ecology. The role of human society and symbolization become fundamentally inseparable in human reality from the basic challenges of adaptation to natural human environments. This has led to a fundamental patterning of human behavior in all respects that can be described as cultural rather than as natural.

*****

There has been no reason to believe that the original human systems were comparable to anything known today or within the last five hundred years of human history. The first two or three million years of human evolution were more like the forgotten early childhood that most of us have lived, remembered but with fragmentary and disjointed images of moments and places. The first two or three million years were probably more like a long and endless dreamscape of humankind's slowly awakening consciousness. Of course, even within this long dreamtime of the first human beings, there may have been long lived traditions and memories that may dwarf anything experienced in recent times. These dreams and collective memories might have been kept alive for thousands of years, not by a long list of one's ancestor's names, but by a deep-seated symbolic attachment to a region and a way of life where one's ancestors have lived, struggled and died for time immemorial. At what point in this long sleep of human consciousness would the first names for people have been given, when something like names would become somehow important to one's self-identity and one's social identity as well? Jane Goodal began naming all her Chimpanzee's with familiar names, more to help herself identify and sort out who was related to whom, than for any convenience or consideration of the Chimps themselves who appeared not to require such devices to recognize one another and to what group they belonged or their social order in a system. And was there a long intermediate time in human evolution, between when the name becomes the first thing given to a new born baby by the parents, and a time when there were no names for people? Could there have been something like a long, stuporous between period when people gradually took on names or distinctive identities in a concrete and increasingly abstract sense? Can we have something like a proto-name or a "half-name" that is said sometimes or even just rarely? What are the qualities of life that become attendant to the ascription of names for people?

The object this seventh chapter is to relate archaeological systems theory, as this has been developed in the third part, to a more general theoretical framework that I have called human systems theory, in order to understand the implications of archaeological systems for a broader understanding of human systems in general, and the implications of human systems theory for application to archaeological knowledge and research. This in part entails understanding the conceptual provenience of archaeological knowledge within a wider terrain of knowledge systems especially as this overlaps with and interrelates to a number of other disciplines like history and anthropology.

Human systems can be said to be historically situated, not in terms of written documents so much as in terms of a generalized and symbolic sense of the past. Even rather "contemporaneous" ethnographies of "extant" peoples are in essence historical documents that deal with past events and systems that humans have developed as a product of time. The archaeological challenge has been and remains the fact that such systems have to be empirically amenable to scientific inquiry in the only terms that are available to us for their recovery and possible reconstruction--that is in terms of the material remains of such systems that are excavated and analyzed.

Thus, archaeology must take up the challenge of the past precisely where known histories, whether textual or oral, leave off. This sets fundamental constraints to archaeological knowledge that is less than ideal in almost every circumstance of its inquiry. The challenge of archaeological theory nevertheless remains the use of evidence of the human past to define and clarify both the history and the evolutionary structure of human systems development and their range of variation and expression in the past.

Archaeologists are not limited strictly to the material artifacts of the things they unearth, and their archaeological context in relation to other excavations. Ethnographic evidence is far game for archaeological researchers, as all such evidence is also part of the past. So is historical evidence. So is biological and ecological evidence. So is linguistic and symbolic and other cognitive evidence. Evidence of human systems in the present provides a great deal of information pertinent to our past, because our systems, in an objective sense, are derived from past systems and therefore should contain hidden clues and surviving structures from the past. It is somewhat akin to studying a middle-aged adult to understand how human beings develop as young children. All of this evidence has utility value for archaeologists if it can help them to analysis and systematically interpret the evidence of the past in a relatively unbiased manner. Such evidence is therefore only useful in so much as it is factual, empirically driven, and scientifically defined and tested. It makes no sense to apply anthropological models. It is somewhat less than useful if and when it is itself biased, ideologically confounded, and closed as a form of knowledge.

In this fourth part, I attempt to address aspects of what I would call "common" culture in the sense of the elaboration of primary cultural patterns in a primitive and prototypical manner without the degree of technological sophistication or conceptual innovation that is evident in more "traditional" anthropological contexts. Cultural systems can be considered to be "metasystems" in the sense that they achieve natural integration of various forms and functions in a consistent manner. The study of cultural patterning usually entails the dissection of natural systems along subject and/or disciplinary boundaries of knowledge stratification. These boundaries rarely reflect the real organizational patterning of culture, and often interfere with understanding the interrelationships between different institutional aspects of socio-cultural process.

I approach from a multidimensional and polythetic standpoint several basic aspects of what I would call "primitive" cultural systems, namely, language, symbolic cognition, social organization & structure, religion, art, ecology and what I will call historical process. I then in the final chapter attempt to tie these various dimensions back into what I would call a synthetic explanation of a primitive or primary cultural metasystem.

The aim and presupposition of a concept of a primitive "common culture" is that the original, prototypical form of cultural patterning on a basic level was more or less the same for everyone, in that most people were presented with very similar kinds of ecological life-profiles. They may have inhabited a very broad range of ecological zones and niches, but they may also have faced the same basic kinds of evolutionary and existential consequences with the same basic rudimentary tools, techniques and symbols for mediating and mastering their environmental situations. "Common culture" can be referred to as "basic cultural patterning" that underlies structurally all variations of form and function evident in the ethnographic or archaeological record.

At the same time, I wish to call into question the wisdom of presuming such a "common culture" in place of what may in fact have been a general absence or vacuum of culture, especially in the elaborated forms that we have come to understand this in traditional tribal contexts. A strong case can be made for a prevalent condition of cultural schizophrenia and social-ecological atomization upon a basic level that tended to stand in the way of the formation of larger social organizational structures or the emergence of long-lasting and widespread cultural traditions or civilizational complexes. The notion of the primitive culture bearer as an omniscient informant, of an almost completely individualized patterning of cultural variation, flies in the face of the notion of traditional culture as being coercive in taboos and sanctions and depending upon a mechanical solidarity to achieve social coordination. But it may not be so far fetched a notion if we understand that in the original framework of primordial or proto-cultural patterning, not such frameworks, rules or social formations existed by which people could be molded in similar and common ways. Some kind of a nuclear and familial framework did undoubtedly exist, and these must have been integrated into some larger and consistent network of relationships between familial frameworks. It appears, for instance, that bilateral kinship patterns are more suitable for an atomistic framework than patrilineal or ambilineal kinds of patterns, as the emphases is upon the collateral ties of ego in a dynamically shifting present, rather than rooted in a deeper sense of the past. A case can be made for reduced, context-dependent and relatively diffuse structures of meaning that lack semantic refinement. From a linguistic standpoint, we are talking about socio-cultural contexts that can be called "pre-oral" in the way that oral cultural traditions are understood. At the same time, from a cognitive standpoint, we can refer to the relatively undifferentiated state of cognitive development that takes its cues mostly from the natural environment and its patterning, and lacking any significant material or social cultural context within which it can achieve a standard or highly elaborated form. A strong case can be made that even perceptual patterns would be fundamentally different and experience a form of organic synaesthesia or eidetic response. We can see in religious forms that the basic pattern is a very diffuse form of animism in which there is no clear boundary between the natural and the supernatural, or the state of reality and the states of dreams.

I do not mean to suggest, by the term of cultural schizophrenia, that our hominid precursors were non-rational, unorganized or incapable of sane problem solving and lucid perception of the natural world. Rather, to the extent that human intelligence is conditioned by environmental stimuli, when the cultural parameters are lacking or reduced, it can be seen that environmental patterns rooted to a fundamental sense of human ecology without technological or cultural sophistication, will take priority. The result will be the ordering of disorder, or the symbolic structuring of external stimuli and phenomena that are essentially random and naturally patterned, rather than being culturally organized.

It might be expected that in such circumstances, instinct would play a greater role in the organization of behavioral response, especially to the extent that instinct would guide what can be considered to be impulsive or automatic responses to environmental stimuli or situations. The cultural controls, and attendant psychological repressions of basic impulsive drives, would not exist except perhaps in a very rudimentary form.

The result is an understanding of our deep sense of the shared past as something fundamentally very different than any human being of the 20^th Century, even in remote regions, may know or have an experience with. At the same time, if this is a basic and common "proto-cultural" pattern, then aspects and dimensions of this patterning should remain rooted in our shared "natures" even today, in spite of our cultural conditioning and attempts to mold people into perfect culture machines. We cannot today say exactly what a natural human being, unfettered and unconditioned by cultural processes, would be like. We do not know what the full range of human instinct might have been. But if we look for analogues in nature, we can distinguish the domestic dog with its feral cousins, especially the prototypical wolf, and we can see that the wolves instincts are fit within a tight social-ecological framework and conditioned by this framework. This is exactly what is broken down and "bred" out in the domestication of many different breeds of dogs, fit within a range of functional social-ecological contexts, whether this is herding sheep or cattle or hunting rats and small varmints.

In this, we can see the early basis for the emergence and differentiation of cultural patterning as being in the varying socio-ecological frameworks in which groups of people found themselves. This range of frameworks expanded over time to encompass almost every possible terrestrial ecological zone open to human beings.

I would like to think that our ancient precursors were finely attuned to their natural world, and that culture arose essentially as a by-product of this sophisticated ecological adaptation of human behavioral response. Humans were capable of observing many patterns in natural settings, and of learning from memory, experience and experimentation, the behaviors and manners of all kinds of flora and fauna. This kind of knowledge was perhaps traded off for cultural knowledge and dependency, and was thus progressively lost when humans achieved cultural and technological sophistication. The idea that our early hominid ancestors could observe nature in detail, and become the expert naturalists of their environment without needing to know the scientific names or taxonomies of the species they dealt with, capable of rapidly reading and adapting to ever shifting frames of reference, is perhaps as cliché as it is ignored as a reasonable explanation for proto-cultural patterning.

The kinds of proto-cultural metasystems our precursors had were perhaps more like the patterning of Chimpanzee groups observed naturally in Central and Western Africa than any other kind of animal we can think of today. They undoubtedly exhibited a greater range of patterning than can be found among the reduced and circumscribed populations of primates in the world today.

*****

Proto-culture can be defined as the basic aspects of primary cultural adaptations and institutions in relation to the general definition of culture already offered in this work. Anthropological culture has always construed the definition of culture, ethnographically described, as being bound within a preexisting context of cultural tradition and social history. Anthropological inquiry has fallen short of addressing the problem of what cultural adaptations may have looked like before the emergence and elaboration of such cultural contexts and traditions in the world. To some extent, this becomes a central problem in archaeological systems and in the definition of archaeological culture versus anthropological culture. If archaeologists can answer sufficiently for themselves and other scientists the question as to what constitutes the pan-human basis of cultural patterning, and how basic cultural patterning may be distinguished from its elaborated derivative patterning in human prehistory, then archaeological systems theory will have taken a step toward greater comprehensiveness and objectivity of its knowledge base.

The explanation I seek for human proto-culture is well with a human systems theoretic perspective, to the extent that such proto-culture was foundational to the rise and development of human systems in the first place. I seek to define proto-culture in terms of the first developing institutional manifestations that such culture would have taken beyond the ecological and obvious technological and material aspects, that some anthropologists might consider to be not culture itself, but the by-products and manifestations of a deeper cultural process.

The basis of understanding a protocultural system is, I believe, to understand such a system in what can be considered a minimally differentiated state, or a maximally undifferentiated state. Differentiation theory relates the cognitive organization and mapping of the human brain with the order and level of complexity of behavioral response and pattern recognition in the effective environment. Undifferentiated response is characteristic of an undeveloped and unsophisticated state of mind, and is characterized by certain distinct features such as diffuseness of stimulus-reponse patterning, lack of sophisticated mechanisms of ego-control or defense, lack of flexibility of response patterning, etc. In a relatively undifferentiated proto-cultural patterning, the distinctions we may make between different institutional aspects of a culture may be unclear or vague at best. Language may exhibit a minimal structure and the hallmarks of early primary acquisition such as overextension of reference. If we are referring to a language system that is primarily, or at least seeming, one of gesture-gesticulation, we can refer to a heavy degree of context-dependency in the structuring of the language, its primarily concrete and functional application, the lack of separate between para-linguistic and linguistic signals, such that linguistic signals may not be given priority over non-verbal forms of communication. Such a language system, though in a broad and basic sense universal to all proto-cultural systems, would in fact be so idiosyncratic in its effects that it would be effective for only small-group communication, presumably within stable family or kin-centric groupings. Similarly, language and thought would be fused, as would be body language and feeling. The capacity for sophisticated prevarication by the strict separation of modes of expression and communication would be lacking compared to what is achievable in more differentiated systems. It would be expected therefore that very early proto-culture would in essence be primarily functional and adaptational in orientation, and would reflect very concrete and naturalistic relationships with an effective environment in which other people were more a part of the natural framework than a part of a larger social-institutional setting. We would expect therefore that the first differentiations of language, culture and cognition to be primarily those relating to the pragmatics of getting things done, of survival, and a rudimentary semantics that is understood in a concrete and relational sense, rather than in any abstract or formal manner.

The basis for an understanding of proto-culture is in terms referred to as the worldview problem, or rather, how people come to organize and structure their view of the world, and how this affects their behavioral interactions and adaptations in the world. In this, the analytical distinctions are made between the problem and role of language, culture (conceived in both a material and social frame of reference) and cognition, and the nature of the interactions between these three areas. Like the previous eco-cultural model that relates the individual, environment and social group in a systems based, interfunctional model, the relations between language, culture and cognition are not seen as being necessarily ordered in any deterministic manner, but rather in a complementary and interfunctional system. It can be said therefore that in a proto-cultural phase of human evolution, one that presumably characterized the first three or four million years of hominid cultural development, that these three analytic distinctions may not have been as clearly made as they can be today in reference to modern or contemporary historical culture patterning. These were all but facets of the same essential anthropological trait complex in its most basic sense, and there may have been little distinction between language as a form of communication and thought as a form of feeling or self-expression, or between the thoughts and feelings of the self, as somehow fundamentally private and ego-centric, as opposed to those expressions of other members of one's group. Socially, groups would have been "organically" intertwined such as the boundaries between self and significant other would have been diffuse at best and in some ways altogether lacking. Touching, holding, shading into physical aggression or expressions of human sexuality and feeling would have been a normal part of one's own identity, and a way of reinforcing one's bonds and identity in the world. Grooming is a typical behavioral response of all primates that permits alleviation of stress and interpersonal communication at an organic level.

Perhaps if we want to understand human protoculture, a good place to start is in the observation of human child culture in contexts where this is not mediated by adults. Of course, this is only a rough analogy, as it is clear that even very young human children are imbibing a very great deal about their cultural context and world beyond that available to them in the immediate framework of their family and home life. In other words, most of contemporary child culture is pretty much shaped already by the larger adult-sized cultural context in which they are raised, thus confounding such an analogy between contemporary child culture and human proto-cultural patterning.

We can explain the rise of what might be referred to as intermediate or secondary institutions as a manner of introducing increasing levels of differentiation and control over the behavior of the individual, with internalized controls mutually reinforced by external social sanctions and constraints, whether direct or indirect, explicit or implicit. Language, culture and cognition would in such "fully humanized" contexts have emerged as full blown, such that it would become possible for people to say one thing and mean another, or to act in a manner that is independent of the response patterns of the rest of one's group. This was not arrived at overnight, and its possibility seemed to be indirectly at least relative to the larger eco-cultural system as this was gradually emerging.

The noetic behavior of our hominid precursors would have been fundamentally different from what we experience today. The cultural context for the development of symbolic behavior as it occurs today would have been almost entirely absent. The almost steady increase in cranial capacity, especially in the regions of the frontal and parietal cerebellum, demonstrates a positive correlation between increase in brain size and the emergence of a viable cultural context within which people could operate. And this was not a hen or egg type of question. It is clear that selection in human beings was continuously in favor of larger and larger brained individuals who had greater symbolic capacity that became expressed in terms of cultural mediation of the natural world. I do not believe that selection operated upon an individual level, so much as upon a group level, which in human terms became defined increasingly in terms of cultural differentiation of behavior within group contexts. Selection therefore favored those small groups the individuals within which could effectively adapt to and survive their complex environments, in intermural competition with other groups. In small group configurations, population bottle-necks could occur frequently under adverse circumstances that eliminated even a few members, and hence a founder's effect could be experienced within a relatively short time. A group that was culturally successful would be capable of rapidly expanding its population base and of branching out and expanding the limits of its usual home territory. Many groups would have come and gone--many might have failed. Each would have represented a natural experiment in the articulation of basic cultural patterning.

It would be difficult to say exactly what set of selection factors were important to the rise of bigger brains in human evolutionary development. We can site natural factors that promoted adaptive survival, social selection factors, such as mate choice and preferences that favored some individuals over others, or cultural selection factors (sanctions and constraints, conditioned aversions and appetites) that operated within a group context, or possibly even early psychological selection factors of personal preferences and idiosyncracies of character. It would be impossible to devise a coherent and consistent model of these selection factors operating one way in every and any evolutionary context--rather, it would have been more realistic from a systems standpoint to examine the possible combinations and interaction of these kinds of selection factors to determine what may have been the most likely order. Cultural selection factors would have played an increasingly important role as time went by, to the point even of practically disengaging more immediate forms of natural selection.

An important question to ask in the evolution of human cultural behavior is at what point that individual human behavior and needs became subordinate to the needs of the group as a whole. At what point would some altruistic, genuine social commitment of the individual to the group be demanded. Individual and group survival would have been one and the same thing in early contexts--an individual dispossessed of his connection to a group would have been doomed to perish. At the same time, small groups probably depended upon the actions and competencies of just a handful of leaders by which to achieve success, as well as the cooperation of everyone. I do not believe it was ever possible for members of a group to freely dissociate themselves or detach themselves from the framework of the group. If social atomism existed, it must have existed at the level of the small group or band, possibly a loose consociation of a handful of families or at most of several lineages bound together by exchanges and intermarriage and by social custom that demanded reciprocity. Families would not have been atomized, so much as small groups would become splintered off from larger more established groups to expand and form satellite populations.

If we were to examine any culture-geographical map of any period of remote hominid history, we would surely find many colored bounded culture areas across a variegated landscape. What we could not see in any slice of the map of time would be the transitional patterning of movement, growth and death of groups and the ways in which these various culture areas fluctuate from one decade to the next or from one century to the next. There would be nothing upon such a map that was permanent and not ephemeral given enough time. The map taken a thousand years later would look completely different that the first one take

If we wish to find models for pre-symbolic behavior, the best place to start is with the examination of human child culture and cognition before the age of five-years-old. I do not believe that this is the best possible model to use, but it is surely one that is immediately available to us. The reason for this is not the claim that hominid precursor brains were childlike and did not develop to a level of maturity, but that the symbolic context for the development of mental capacities comparable to anything known today among human beings simply did not exist in the same form. We end up with preliterate, and indeed, at early enough time, with pre-oral people. In such contexts, it can be said that most mental operations were probably fairly concrete.

If we seek to use as exemplars the behavior of hunter-gathering peoples of the recent past, we find a degree of sophistication of behavior and intuneness with the environment that is anything but childlike and undeveloped.

I would make an assertion that proto-symbolic behavior may have had the following characteristics: 1. It was based upon direct emblematic pattern recognition and mental association of concrete perception without significant propositional formulation. In other words, if our hominid precursors "thought" a lot about things in their world, their thoughts would have been directed more towards immediate concerns and concrete associations without a significant degree of formal abstractions; 2. Behavioral experience, perception and response was "polymorphous" and largely unconditioned. In other words, there were in place few if any psychological mechanisms of repression of experience, and behavioral response was particularly organic toward the environment and other social relations, rather than psychological; 3. Memory experience was largely context-based and geographically situated to a degree that may have been in fact more refined and hyperdeveloped than normally occurs with people today. Memory cues were taken from an environmental framework based upon fine motor skills and pattern recognition that allowed our earliest ancestors to make detailed associations within a natural environment. 4. Cognition would have been characterized, most likely, by what I would call a strong sense of "field dependency" that developed early and in which reliance for cues and information for memory association was derived from an external environment and in turn projected upon an external environment that was always shifting and anxiety provoking. 5. Mechanisms of projection and repression were largely diffuse and undifferentiated, such that pathognomic imagery invoking fear or great anxiety would have taken an unspecific form in the environment. 6. Detailed knowledge was drawn directly from and related directly to a complex natural environment, such that it could be expected that observational knowledge was built up for instance of detailed information about particular kinds and qualities of different flora, fauna, geographical locations and weather or climatological conditions.

In such a framework, symbolic representations would have been rudimentary and unrefined, and drawn directly from imagery in the natural world. Such representations would have served cognitive responses that were fairly concrete and non-abstract, not requiring significant further rationalization or ratiocination. When reason was invoked, it was a kind of concrete logic that reflected the natural order of the world around them. I do not think that conceptions of today that represent "social constructions"--marriage, murder, or even "love"--would have had much significance in such contexts. I doubt whether if anyone then did anything "wrong" that it would be considered "sinful" or become the cause for great consternation. Rather, right and wrong behavior would have been largely situationally defined and modified by the expectations of reponse such behavior would elicit from others. It would be difficult today for any of us to imagine what the noetic, subjective consciousness of this kind of behavior would have been like, as we are so prone to the rationalization of our experiences that even our perception of experience, our first apprehension and encounter with the world, has become transformed in a basic way that prevents us from experiencing the world in a more direct manner.

*****

The first development of human language demands explanation, and is important for several reasons to the development of archaeological systems theory. Language patterning and change follows systematic principles that constitutes the basis for the science of linguistics, and these patterns entail that some elements and features of a languages will show signs of similarity and patterning that permit us to make reasonable guesses about inheritance and ancestry of language families. The concern I have with proto-language is to explain how such early pre-linguistic systems may have been instrumental in the cultural mediational function that permitted human adaptation. Human language in a basic sense is symbolic, and it encodes meaning in an abstract way that permits its reification independently of the experience to which the meaning is associated. A great deal of language pattern can be said to be "native listener intuition" in the sense that fluency in a language, and an implicit, embedded understanding of its semantic structure is a prerequisite to using and understanding its codifications in any useful manner. All language from a non-native listener point of view can be said to appear "holophrastic" or in the form of long one-word sentences, as a non-native listener is unable to make the fine phonetic and phonemic distinctions that are necessary to convey and carry meaning. Even Chimpanzees in their chatter and calls may be making semantically meaningful statements that appear to a non-native speaker as so much gibberish--human listeners would be unable to make the finer phonetic distinctions of a Chimpanzee language system. This is a typical response patterning to oral linguistic signals when there is no embedded basis for understanding the system.

I will venture to state that a human protolanguage will tend towards the following kinds of patterns: 1. It will appear to be holophrastic. 2. It will have a reduced grammatical structure that conflates unmarked covert categories of meaning, and its semantic structure will be similarly unrefined and basic. 3. It will be pragmatically oriented. 4. It will be largely context-dependent and context driven as a language system. 5. I will predict that human protolanguage tended to begin in the back and low in the mouth, and only moved forward and high as time went on. 6. I would venture also that original protolanguage lacked a full phonetic-phonemic complement of vowel and consonant sounds, but tended to rely upon a few key sounds around which other sounds were developed or derived. 7. The language would tend to be "prototypically" basic in the sense that it included basic nouns and verbs, or perhaps even a single syntactic class of words that could function as noun-verbs depending upon the context of its use. We can refer to the common semantic feature of the overextension of reference as a characteristic of such a system--the same term being applied differentially to different classes of objects or things, perhaps then subsequently marked to distinguish the different categories of meaning.

In the development of a theory of symbolic linguistics, I have previously made an assertion that human proto-language would have been in the form of "gesture-gesticulation" such that body language, facial expression and especially hand signals would have been intrinsic to the speech act or communication event. A sign language may have been an early form of pan-language that permitted people ease of communication across linguistic boundaries. Gesticulations would have taken the forms of "calls" and vocalizations characteristics of many primates that express emotions, warnings, states of agitation, or that communicate the presence of some thing to other members of one's group. Body language may take very symbolically stylized expressions that leave the listener, or watcher, with little doubt about the intentions or expectations of the communicator. If one observes deaf people signing language, they are almost reflexively moving their mouths while they gesture with their hand signals, and this brings the focus of attention not on the hands itself, which are in continuous motion, but upon the face of the speaker. It is known as well that those who use sign language are employing the same areas of language, namely Broca's area and Wernicke's area, that are employed by those who are able to use language aurally and orally.

If one examines the history of communication systems, one sees that in general writing systems go from very context dependent, iconographic pictographs, towards mixed rebus systems, through mixed pictographic-syllabaries, through true syllabaries based upon the sound system of the language, through mixed syllabic alphabets, to full alphabets, which represent the complete abstraction of the meaning independent of the sound carrying units. I believe a similar model would apply to the oral development of human language as well as to the development of symbolic cognition in the human brain as well, and all these developments are also tied to the larger contextual issues of the development of cultural patterning in human groups. Context dependent systems fail to fully separate the meaning from the thing that carries the meaning, or the vessel of the meaning. Each thing would have its own meaning, and this meaning may be generalized or specifiable in a given context, but the thing that it is intrinsically attached to would be invariable and received as a whole thing. For purposes of simplification, a single polysemic symbol can stand for a great deal of complex meanings that are context dependent. Typically, such symbols would encode and stand for entire events, or episodes, or situations or even settings that are clear to the mind of the purveyor of these symbols, but strike any stranger unfamiliar with the entire system as a complete mystery. Such symbols can be seen as overloaded and top-heavy devices that cannot carry over flexibly from one context to another. They are like coded signals that stand for entire sentences or even entire paragraphs of meaning, compared to symbolic forms that just stand for one word that may nevertheless carry a definition or set of definitions that are context dependent.

The linguistic landscape 100,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago may have been fundamentally more variegated and complex than the linguistic landscape one or two hundred years ago. Where now we might speculate about one mother tongue from which all extant languages may be descendants under a single superfamily tree, the roots of this tree 100,000 years BP may have been only one set of systems among many that existed at the time. What we witness in our current distribution of languages are all full blown human languages with complex structures. This may have been, like elaborated culture, only a single set of linguistic achievements 100,000 years previously. The language systems that may have existed back then may have been fundamentally different in structure and form than what we understand languages today. Where there may have been from 3 to 5 thousand languages that were spoken in the world 1000 years ago, there may have been 5 to 10 times that number of proto-languages used 50,000 years ago. Our modern human precursors, the descendants of our African Eve, represented only one set of tongues out of many that were being used. They did not radiate out 50,000 to 70,000 years ago to encounter only ecological vacuums wherever they went. The proto-languages that were developed previously may have had a multi-regional genesis that reached back to Homo erectus half a million years previously, and represented many, many different proto-cultural orientations that were competing with one another upon a complex mosaic landscape for success and survival. Single, more successful language systems, systems that developed on the move, so to speak, came to crowd out and predominate and proliferate at the expense of less successful precursors. It was not that the languages themselves were more or less efficient, but that they would have been part of a larger cultural system of adaptation that was relatively more or less successful in competition to other systems.

The earlier proto-linguistic systems were not just pre-literate, but in a sense, they may have been pre-oral as well, in the sense that we relate oral cultures to an oral tradition and to secondary institutions that reinforce and encode this tradition. Thus, linguistic codifications might have been in general more attached directly to a sense of place and thing than is the case with oral traditions. In this regard, we must also ask what the origins of a sense of song, poetry, meter and dance may have been, and how these may have related to the early development of language. If people sat around the hearth at night, information may have been exchanged, stories told, and dances performed and trances envisioned.

One cannot sufficiently consider models of proto-cultural development without taking somehow into account the evidence of social relations and organization as these may have been similar or different than we now know these to occur. It appears for instance that bilateral kinship systems centered upon the kindred are more flexible to variable social structure than more rigid lineal and clan based systems. In this sense, one might expect the simplest kind of structure is a one based upon a Hawaiian kinship structure that encodes the fewest numbers of kin-terms that are most proximate to ego, compared to isolating structures that encode the highest number of kin-terms. It should come as a surprise therefore to find some of the most elaborate and complicated kinship systems to have been elaborated by the Australian aborigines, but this should belie something about the origins of their system, and the fact that they were originally in fact part of a more recent and modern period of human evolution in which complex moiety structures were clearly developed.

I will take a simple kindred system to be the most basic and prototypical pattern of kinship possible in human society. All elaborations of kin systems represent therefore some kind of variation or alteration from this basic prototypical form. This is not to say that the kinship systems of 500,000 years BP, if such things existed, all resembled more or less a kindred-based system. Kinship may not have been important at this time, and if it was, probably in a form much more simplified in structure and immediate in its implications and consequences, than anything now experienced.

Social structure is not just about kinship structure. It entails as well patterns of marriage or conjugation for the purposes of reproduction. First, modern humans have to get past the hang-ups of existing in a monogamous and sexually repressed society. It is likely that the original social structures of human society were largely polygamous of one form or another, and that mixed polygamous systems were the general rule for society 100,000 years ago. This is not to say that pair-bonding may not have occurred, but I suspect that the bonding of many social relationships may have lacked the psychological intensity and investment or carried the heavy social loadings that they have today. I suspect that many early humans entered into and out of relations out of convenience and as opportunity presented itself, but also that such relations may have been marked by much potential violence and conflict.

In such a framework, those who could keep promises may have had better long-term luck than those who might manipulate the truth to their own ends, though this is clearly debatable. Given the nature of most social interactions today, I would be inclined to agree that the chronic cheater and manipulator would have shown greater intelligence and would have been more successful in passing on their genetic complement to future generations compared to those who were tried and true in social relations. The real truth may have been somewhere in between, in the sense that loyalty and filiality and the need for solidarity or honesty may have been largely situationally or contextually determined.

What I see our protocultural ancestors being is enmeshed in a larger field of social relations that defined a competitive-cooperative continuum and in which any particular relationship may have ranged somewhere between these extremes for a variety of reasons. Thus, one's ally or friend in one context, may well become one's enemy or adversary in some other kind of situation. Trust was extendible only so far as the situation or circumstances demanded, and was dictated as much by narrow self-interest as it was by any altruistic sense of loyalty to a larger group. I may be wrong in this regard, but I do not see our proto-cultural ancestors as necessarily having been very heroic in their day-to-day life. I find few genuine heroes today, and I see no reason why yesterday should have been an inherently better period of time to live in. It must be seen that many of these kinds of abstract pro-social notions were later constructions of more developed cultural systems that may have placed a greater stake in human cooperative endeavors and in rigid conformity to somewhat narrow and coercive traditions. I doubt whether the earlier kinds of systems could have exacted or expected such coercive conformity from the members of the group. Rather, the coercion felt by the early members of society was the coercion of circumstances that may have frequently been life or death, circumstances dictated by natural selection and by a form of social selection without the intervention of well developed cultural variables or contexts.

If group boundaries were not exactly or always clear cut, then it is possible that allegiances, networks and group identities were continuously shifting, and that people might have been able to pass readily from one group or another, either by adoption, marriage, or by involuntary servitude. I think group boundaries may have existed, but never as an all or none kind of thing, or as a line drawn in the dirt between one's enemies and one's own kind. They may have existed as matters of degree of distance from ego or the kin-group, and the immediate kin-group may have been the primary reference point of one's social identity. There may have simply been no proto-social "nations" or even "tribes" or "the people" in a larger or more general sense of the term.

If we observe all economic relationships, including those of marriage, we see that those relations defined by reciprocity and trade are often also defined by potential risk and conflict. Thus, the cooperative-competitive continuum would have operated in both directions at the same time. It can be expected that people would have preferred to trade and barter over resorting to confiscation and force, but this is not necessarily true. Trade can be seen in this sense as both a conflict mediating mechanism, but also as a potential conflict-generating mechanism as well.

*****

The models of archaeological systems theory developed previously are applied to a larger "eco-evolutionary" context that explores human systems as natural systems within a larger biological and evolutionary framework. Eco-evolutionary models that have been developed in biological systems theory are especially appropriate to the understanding of cultural systems as these relate both to other natural systems and as they relate socially to one another in larger regional and interregional settings. Archaeological systems are often restricted by a limited data-base to explore primarily human ecological relationships to a natural environment. It is therefore instructive and useful to go into greater depth to explore the possibilities of these relational patterning and their consequences for human systems and their trajectories through time upon natural landscapes.

In seeking to define more critically the interrelations between anthropological and biological theory, especially in the area referred to as ecology, I have developed a general sense of the perspective about population dynamics, and social relational and event structures, and understanding of social dynamics, mechanics and statics, that apply on both anthropological and biological scales and levels of observation with more or less equal measure. There are differences of course between anthropological, or human systems, and other biological systems that are non-human, and a part of this perspective in social ecology is the critical examination of these differences and their outcomes in a more systematic manner. Human systems are fundamentally biological systems at some level of competition with other alternative kinds of biological systems--but they are also cultural systems that create certain unique kinds of adaptational contexts and structures that permit alternative evolutionary pathways for life to follow. Social ecology has thus a kind of parallax of perspective, with one foot in biology and the other in anthropology, that informs the dialectics between the two fields of inquiry. Social ecology is thus a synthesis of this interdisciplinary dialectic.

I would say that this paradigm is in direct noetic competition with and opposition to the alternative paradigm that has been developed, and that is referred to as socio-biology. Socio-biology is a theoretical perspective that is rooted to the observation of insect communities, with general derived inference being extended to the structure of all biological communities. Almost pointless to say, nature articulates very different at the level of the beehive or ant colony than at the level of an ungulate herd or a Baboon troop, much less a full blown human city. The danger of such an approach is of course, the fallacy of overemphasis and a very basic kind of zoomorphization between inappropriate levels. As we step up the chain of phenomenal complexity of natural biological systems, we must see that the form of ant-colony ethics that may be applied to the structure of societies on an insect level does not apply to the structure of social groups among birds or reptiles, much less to primates and hominids.

Group structure and dynamics becomes an important frame of reference for understanding biological social organization upon all levels. Operating principles driving these group patterns at all levels predetermine and prestructure the outcomes of individual behaviors, and in turn are shaped by these individual behaviors. While most of this understanding seems to apply to animal communities, I will make a case that a similar if fundamentally different kind of understanding can be applied to plant communities as well, and to inter-Kingdom heterogeneous communities at a different level of analysis. We must understand that the informational patterning affecting these different structures are inherently different in structure and design, and therefore lead to different kinds of patterning and results.

*****

It is the intention of this brief paper to discuss the central role played by communication systems in most animal species in mediating environmental and social relations. It is a claim of this paper that such systems of communication, behaviorally expressed, constitute social parameters for learning and acquisition of information among members of a coherent population, leading to patterns of social organization that affect the adaptability of the population as a whole. It is argued that when exogenous biotic and a-biotic changes occur environmentally that have a disruptive effect upon such a society of animals, then the communication system will tend to increase in its noise and inefficiency, and will in the long run breakdown, signaling the disintegration of the social system upon which it was based. Such breakdown will predispose otherwise healthy members of such a population to higher risks of maladaptation and negative selection, and generalized disrupting selection will tend to operate across all age sets of the population in an equivalent manner. Such a process can result in loss of the population as a coherent society, and even in extinction of the species as a whole. It will favor in the long run those creatures who are more capable of understanding communications in low signal to noise ratios, and are capable of learning and adapting new signal systems to behavioral modification. The consequence of such speciation should be a phyletic trend towards larger brains and more effective systems of communication within the design constraints of the evolved communication system, determinable by means of the number and quality of design features intrinsic to such communication systems. I will refer to this evolutionary process as bio-cybernetics, or the rise of nervous control systems influencing the behavior and patterning of biological systems and their evolutionary outcomes.

This process seems to be correlated evolutionarily with the rise of mobility of animal systems, though individual organisms that are capable of independent locomotion and translocation in an environment help to define especially the Kingdom Animalia from the other Kingdoms of life. I will argue that the same mechanisms that allowed for mobility, namely the development of a nervous system, some form of skeletal structure, and a musculature, allow for the realization of communication systems as well. I will refer to these as interdependent trait complexes in an evolutionary and ecological sense.

From this model, we can explain clearly the rise of human systems in terms of a coherent, biocybernetic model of anthropogenesis. Humans evolved a unique form of communication system, natural human language, that was associated with the rise of a very large brain and complex social interactions across a range of environmental habitats and niches. Early hominids were largely opportunistic generalists who relied upon sophisticated symbolic communication to achieve mastery over their environments, allowing them to calculate and predict the movements of other animals and the patterning of weather and seasonal cycles. It allowed them to navigate long distances between prominent land marks and to utilize distinctive geographical features of the landscape, and to transmit this information from group to group and from generation to generation.

Finally, since communication is alleged to occur primarily and almost exclusively among animal systems, consideration is given of the possibilities and influences of such communication upon other kinds of biological systems, particularly floral systems. It is argued that though plant systems do not have active communication systems, many of their evolved responses and trait patterns are counter-adaptative and co-evolutionary to the rise of such systems in animals. Similarly we can look to other Kingdoms of life to find specialized adaptations in relation to animal systems in particular, or at least indirectly via other kinds of biological systems.

Understanding the role of bio-cybernetics in the rise of complexly stratified and heterogeneous ecosystems on the earth allows us to address a level of informational integration occurring in nature that permits complex chains of self-organized interactions to occur between different kinds of life forms. Organisms that evolved a degree of communicative efficacy of their social systems achieved a degree of selective fitness and adaptability in their eco-trophic niches that permitted partial control over these relationships. Behavior, of instance, found in social insects such as ants or bees, that are normally attributed to a form of altruistic kin-selection, can be more realistically represented as the consequences of a mechanical system of communication and built-in signal response systems that predetermines the actions and fate of the creatures so involved. Such creatures do not consider the consequences of their behavior or calculate the larger social implications of their call for action. In a basic way, the same thing still happens with large brained mammals like Human beings, who will respond in an expectable manner to certain kinds of signals regardless of the degree of symbolic intermediation and ratiocination that may or may not be involved.

There is a general sense that the role of communication in the evolution of animals and related systems on earth has not been fully or adequately addressed by research, primarily it seems often because such communication systems are implicit to the behavior and biomechanics of organisms, and such systems, not resembling the sophicatication of human languages, are not as obvious or available to empirical analysis. Nevertheless, communication has been documented in many different species, indeed, in most animal systems some form of communication system can be described. Even so, it remains empirically problematic to demonstrate just how and how much such systems can influence the patterning of ecosystems and the effect of natural selection on those species.

Communication often crosses inter-specific boundaries, and the question of communicative efficacy and relative noise becomes important in understanding competitive/cooperative inter-specific relationships within ecosystems. Before proceeding, it is important to articulate several facets of natural communication systems as they occur in animal systems:

Such systems vary in their sophistication and design features such that we can say in general:

The more complex the system of communication, the larger the brain of the animal, and the more differentiated and flexible is the system of response of the organism to variable environmental stimuli. More complex systems of communication in general entail greater possibility of communicative efficacy and interference between species. It also entails more opportunities for modification and learning to occur that enhances the adaptability of such systems. Bio-cybernetic patterns arise in association with sophisticated patterns of animalian response and adaptation that result in critical reverberation in the surrounding matrix of alternate systems.

All natural relationships between living organisms of whatever kind can in general be said to be fundamentally competitive, neutral or cooperative. Of these three alternatives, we can speculate that there is a fundamental mechanical competition occurring in all forms of relationship, to the extent that each organism is competing with any other organism for limited environmental resources. It is the intensity, kind and extent of competition that distinguishes different functional relationship. Complex systems of communication are evolved that essentially mediate basic competition in order that the basis of the relationship between two organisms may be functionally elaborated in more sophisticated or differentiated ways.

All communication follows fundamental informational principles that stipulates that the expectability or relative certainty/uncertainty of the next signal will be a measure or determinant of the relative coherence or efficacy of the system. If the expectation of a certain kind of signal is low, then communicative efficacy or coherence of a system can be said to be low, characterized by random noise and interference. If the expectation of a signal proves to be high, then coherence is high and the system can be said to be characterized by high fidelity and efficiency. There is an optimum range of communication systems in which signal response integrity is high, but not so high as to be rigid and inflexible. Information depends upon the reception of a new signal that is both relatively low in expectability and yet not random or "insignificant."

Communication can be considered to occur intra-specifically in animal systems at levels that involve various life-phases of an animal's expected life history. We can thus name critical periods where communicative efficacy between members of an animal population are functionally most necessary:

1. Mating & reproduction

2. Parent-child learning & nurturance

3. Feeding patterns and dispersal-reaggregation

4. Threat alert and response

5. Migration & settlement patterns

6. In dominance, agonism and social aggression

7. Patterns of peer relation and group formation/dynamics

Before proceeding with this model of bio-cybernetics, it is important to elaborate an underlying understanding of the basic nature of control systems that influence the patterning of complex ecosystems. In this case, we must distinguish several features. First, the kinds of communication systems I am referring to are specific to the Kingdom animalia and do not occur in any of the other kingdoms of life. Communication systems have cumulatively the effect of a kind of regulatory mechanism that can have various nonlinear outcomes to a larger ecosystems, but this control is only partial and incomplete.

Animal communication systems are constrained in basic ways. For instance, we may say that animal communication is basically a density-dependent relationship. There is some minimum, optimum and possibly maximum level of population density necessary for communication systems to be effective. Too low a density will result in a failure of communication because an individual organism has no one to communicate with. Too high a density may result in too frequent or noisy communications that result in signal inference.

In understanding biological control structures, it is useful to represent all life as occupying some place in a kind of eco-trophic pyramid:

In this model, we may discuss bottom-up control structures versus top-down control structures. Bottom-up control structures, in which control of the higher levels is determined by patterning on more basic trophic levels, is more basic and an independent variable compared to top-down control structures, that are derivative and dependent upon the base upon which they occur. Nevertheless, top-down control structures play an important part in possibly influencing in critical ways the outcomes of the next lower level at which they occur. In general, communication systems are alleged to occur only at the top most level of this pyramid, and can only be both a derivative systems of more basic control structures, and can only function as a secondary feedback mechanism that serves to modulate or regulate the patterning emergent from lower levels.

Furthermore, we may state that at the base of the pyramid, density independent relationships predominate, and the further up the pyramid we go, the more important density dependent relationships become. It is evident from this that animal systems are fundamentally dependent upon the underlying plant and decomposition systems to which they are co-evolutionarily attached. Animal systems are characterized by mobility, which confers upon them the possibility of dispersal and adaptive radiation, but the risks of such movements are high and costly in terms of pre-reproductive mortality. Successful bio-invaders on the other hand can result in major disruptions of the food-chains and ecosystems of the regions that they invade--local species often not having evolved adaptive mechanisms in relation to the new invader.

On the other hand, it is evident that animal systems can have at least a local or intermediate disruptive effect upon the ecosystems upon which they depend, especially in situations aggravated by a-biotic stress and by overpopulation or high densities. But these destructive patterns are possibly infrequent and localized in their consequences. This effect can be continuous and regular, as well as periodic and intermittently.

The question then is to ask again what the role of communication might serve for animals in their adaptation to ecosystems and how this role may have a controlling influence upon the general epi-genetic patterning of these systems. In general it can be said that true social organization is only possible with the development of communication systems that are effective and that are based upon certain distinctive design features. Social organization can be said to be a coherent system of interaction between members of a population that is regular and involves some sense of stratification of roles along various dimensions. Social organization can contain some set or subset of a larger population, or it can possible extend to the entire metapopulation under consideration. Whatever system we specify and delimit, such a system must be seen within a larger surrounding matrix of other inter-specific and a-biotic relations that are part of a larger community ecosystem. Social organization often separates members of the same population into different groupings, and may regulate to some extent the relationships possible between these groupings. We can see stratification especially in contexts where ecological saturation leads to relatively high population densities in a stable, mosaic environment characterized by dynamic equilibrium and where marginal individuals or groups may be forced to occupy the peripheries of such systems.

We must recognize, before proceeding, that communication systems in animal species might take many different forms. It can be based upon vision, acoustical signals, body language, coloration changes, posture, or extended actions. I may be based upon olfaction, upon smells or pheromones or other chemical agents, or it may be tactile. Evidence suggests that some animals may be sensitive to forms of magnetism. Furthermore, communication systems may share a variety of mechanical channels in their normal function.

The shared paradigm for understanding and comparing different animal communication systems exists in the identification of different design features that each communication system can be attributed. In general, more basic and simpler communication systems will have fewer and higher order design features compared to more sophisticated systems, especially human language. Design features of communication systems may include the following paradigm:

Mechanical transmission: a means of signal carrying, either visual, acoustical, tactile or chemical

Broadcast transmission: Once a signal is sent out, it cannot be recalled.

Reflexiveness: Refers to a general awareness of the act of communication as deliberate, or the ability of a signal to refer back to itself as a signal.

Reciprocity: Signal can travel both directions (from sender to receiver and receiver to sender) at the same time.

Prevarication: The capacity to generate false or deceptive signals.

Flexibility: The ability to signal or respond in more than one way to any given stimulus.

Mixed Systems: The capacity for more than a single system of signaling to articulate and inter-digitate with one another within the same frame of reference.

Delayed response: The ability to receive and store the signal, and to respond to it at a later point.

Remote/indirect reference: The ability for the signal to point to a reference that is not immediately in the context of the transmission of the signal.

Displacement: The capacity of the meaning of the signal to be switched or transferred from one reference to another.

Multiplicity: The capacity for a system of communication to convey more than one set of meanings at the same time, or for more than one set or system of signals to convey the same meanings in a different way.

Productivity: The ability to make new sounds and new meanings associated with sounds. The capacity for a finite system of limited signs/signals to be rearranged to create an infinite number of meanings.

Duality of Pattern: The semiotic reference system of a communication system is independent of and separate from the signal system which carries the communication.

Openness: The ability for a system of communication to refer to other things that are not included denotatively within the system.

Arbitrariness: The non-coercive connection between the sign and the signified, or that ability for any sign to stand for any signification.

Alternation: The substitutability of one set of signals at a point of articulation for another set

Stratification/Chunking: The differentiation of signals and their grouping at different levels leading to a complex organization of the signal system.
Symbolization: The ability for a system of communication to take on signals that have many different or related meanings at the same time, and for the signal to stand in place of the meanings.

Generalization: The capacity for a system to refer to sets or kinds of phenomena or references as a class or collective grouping.

We can attempt to analyze and describe any system of animal communication that we may study in terms of these kinds of design features or other design features that may be used to characterize such systems. In general, it can be said that only fairly sophisticated systems of animal communication, usually implying fairly large brains, may adopt level II type characteristics--only human language can be said to have all of the design features listed above. The more sophisticated a system is, the more design features that can be ascribed to that system. On the other hand, even social insect communication systems can prove to be quite complicated and interesting, incorporating many of the level I facets.

The characteristics of such communication systems so described can be correlated with other kinds of characteristics of animal social and behavioral systems, as well as with genotypic complexes or adaptive trait systems, in order to determine any implicit structural relationships underlying such systems and in order to create a basis for comparing different species or kinds of system with one another. Examples among primates are characteristics of relative sexual dimorphism, frequency of ovulation, food-getting patterns, group social patterns (sociability and rank), surroundings and habitat, that are found in consociation that allows us to predict similar trait profiles for different species occupying similar eco-trophic niche matrices in similar ways. Thus tree-climbing insectivores are usually nocturnal and without great sexual dimorphism. On the other end of the continuum, very large gorillas tend to be large gut browsers with a considerable degree of sexual dimorphism and a male-dominated group structure. They knuckle walk on the ground and generally to not stay in trees.

The functional consequences of social organization are to create a group environment that is on some level or the other supportive of the survival of the individual, and the borrows the role played by the individual in service of the group. Social organization, like communication upon which it is based, allows members of coherent group to cooperatively function to achieve results each would have to achieve by themselves separately. The image of a group of ants carrying a large piece of food back to its colony is an example of cooperative effort. The consequence of such organized cooperative effort, achieved through signal response of embedded communication systems, is to preempt the possibility of competition or aggression occurring within the group, the consequences of which might be devastating for the entire group. Cooperation is achieved by coordination of actions and efforts to a common goal, a goal that will be recognized and defined collectively.

The challenge of understanding systems of animal communication is in allowing for coherence of group dynamics over space and time by members who are in continuous independent motion in relation to one another and in relation to other organisms in the environment. Under such conditions communication is prerequisite to the achievement of functional social organization and group integration, without which coordination and integration of function between different individual organisms would be impossible to achieve. In fact, it is only when communication is achieved that true forms of social organization emerge in biological systems, and it is only at this stage of evolutionary development that we can refer to a sense of super-organic integration of living systems as corporate institutional structures that are greater than the mere summation of its individual components. This becomes especially the case when communication allows for and becomes part of systems of social stratification that determine rank order, hierarchy and role differentiation between members of such systems.

We may recognize different kinds of communication system typical of different kinds of animal systems depending upon the functional aspects of such systems. In such a way we can distinguish avian systems, rodent systems, herbivore systems at different levels and of different forms, various predator systems, and of course various kinds of insect systems. We may also distinguish characteristics of herpetological systems, primate systems, and marine fish and mammal systems. Furthermore, we can systematically compare these different kinds of systems upon different levels, in terms of relative design features, in terms of the ecological-adaptive-morphological-behavioral associations with such systems, and in terms of the group-dynamics and outcomes of such systems in their range of environmental settings.

It can be expected that there would occur evolutionary convergence of such systems in their streamlining along similar functional trait adaptations under similar kinds of environmental-ecological conditions. We can refer to bat systems that rely on a kind of acoustical radar as a means of locating prey and food resources and as something unique in the animal kingdom that is not shared by birds in general except in a convergent manner by owls that hunt nocturnally. It appears that sea mammals frequently employ similar designs of acoustical systems in their hunting the depths of the ocean and in navigation. We would expect basic similarities of many different avian systems of communication, especially to the extent that different systems share similar eco-trophic niche profiles in different regions or realms.

The influence upon the environment that can be achieved via communication of animal social systems can be dramatic. Even relatively small insects like ants can, when amassed and well organized into large colonies, result in significant damage to plants and other species in an area. It is possible that large herds of grazers in the past degraded environments to the point of resulting in basic ecological transition and succession within a region. Such large groups of animals may have set the stage for their own collapse as viable populations by the continuous degradation of the environment through maintaining high population densities above carrying-capacity.

In this regard, natural rates of increase of populations will not become altered or effected by carrying-capacity limitations until new-born offspring grow and assume adult status within such groups. Rates of reproduction will continue past carrying-capacity at pre-carrying-capacity rates, often stimulated directly by increasing rates of mortality of excessive or complementary population. It is possible to imagine situations where rates of increase and rates of mortality both achieve a relatively high level in an over-populated region that is supersaturated beyond the bounds of the region’s basic carrying-capacity.

On the other hand, it is important not to overestimate or overemphasize the influence and impact that animal communication systems may have had upon basic biotic surroundings and the biological systems upon which they depend for their own survival. It appears that the independent determinants and driving forces behind natural selection and the direction that evolution takes for life on earth is still fundamentally determined by bottom-up limitations of lower-level orders of the eco-trophic niche profile, upon which levels communication can be said to play a negligible part. Animal systems become susceptible to environmental fluctuations and density independent a-biotic factors affecting the biological substrate upon which they depend.

At the same time, sophisticated systems of communication probably add a dimension of flexibility to animal systems that allow for their broad adaptive radiation and ability to migrate and disperse and to invade new settings under appropriate conditions. Communication systems would permit a certain flexibility to the social ecology of such groups that would enable them to adjust and alter their response patterns to new conditions as they arise. In this sense, communication systems must be seen as inherently adaptive to exogenous sources of change that occur.

I believe that animal communication systems provide an interesting challenge in the study of social ecology. They represent secondary control mechanisms in complex ecosystems, but their impact or influence upon systems is seldom decisive or critical to the structuring of the system as a whole. They have arisen naturally as a consequence of animal systems that were independently mobile. Furthermore, they present the foundation for what can be referred to as proto-cultural adaptation of animals to their environment. In this sense, the role of learning and phenotypic acquisition of behavioral traits becomes important to consider in evolutionary history, as well as the function of an on-going group context in which such learning can take place.

There has occurred an evolutionary succession of larger and larger brained animals who represented cybernetic systems of feedback, response and communication far more sophisticated than their precursors. The presence of an elaborated system of communication would have favored the positive selection of those organisms that were capable of adapting the system of communication to new environmental cues and uses, and that were capable learning extended behavioral response patterns in relation to such communication. Instinctual patterns of fixed response, however elaborated, can be seen as the brain-based inheritance of acquired traits rooted in the extension of communication systems in natural settings. It is evident that human culture, for instance, could not have evolved without some pre-cultural foundation in an elaborated system of communication that, while it may not have been fully symbolic, was probably proto-symbolic and capable of learning and teaching in a manner that is evident among the natural cultural traits observed with Chimpanzee groups today. The fact of the cultural variation of these different, mutually isolated groups demonstrates the non-genetic nature of these behaviors and response patterns. It is clear then that the rise of communication systems, positively adapted for in natural selection regimes, creates the foundation for the rise of cultural systems and for the successful adaptation and radiation of species to complex environments

Bio-cybernetics and the rise of communication systems in animals relates to a particularly interesting pattern of brain function in nature, and this has to do with gestalt figure-ground pattern recognition and the ability to search for and acquire an image in the natural surroundings that matches with minimal error a prototypical image that is retained in the brain of the organism. I attribute this mental function to all animals with fairly sophisticated brains, especially those animals that rely to some extent upon visual cues. Auditory patterns may also be recognized as figure-field relationships when they occur in certain orders and temporal patterns. Such pattern recognition is rooted to perception, perceptual recognition and to a stimulus-response feedback loop that can be mediated and elaborated by higher order brain functions. Such search images may be found in many herpetological fauna, and in all mammals. I believe that such search images, of a fundamentally geometric and reduced form, have even been demonstrated for hymenoptera and probably exists for many other kinds of insects as well. Associated with the acquisition and recognition of such images that are tied to stimulus cues in the natural environment will be a range or series of response reactions on the part of the organism. These response-patterns may be instinctive automatic and relatively fixed, or they may permit some degree of variability and further cognitive processing that would permit variability of response in relation to other important factors.

As dumb as some animals may appear, it is quite evident that such animals, in order to get along as social creatures in complex natural environment, must retain and normally utilize many different kinds of basic image types that are associated with different aspects of the environment or different phases of their adaptation to the environment. Furthermore, matching and refining such search images on the basis of experience, or acquiring new images, must create the basis for a memory or mental repository of such images that will allow the organism to adapt to new circumstances on a continuous basis.

Communication may relate to this process of mental-cognitive adaptation to the environment in the sense that response to sophisticated search imagery and complex environmental stimuli or cues against a noisy background will invariably include some form of communicative signals given to other members of the group. The ability to receive, process and send communicative signals is rooted in the same processes of gestalt pattern recognition that allows the cognition of distinctive cues against a noisy background in the first place, as it represents a very similar kind of information. These may involve alert cues or direct response reactions. Animals must correctly interpret the signals they receive from the environment, and, in order to survive, they must be correct in their interpretation most of the time. It is doubtful that all the animals in a herd need to see the predator stalking in the grass before they are made to stampede. Animals do not need to see a threat to have a sense of threat communicated to them. The communication serves enough to evoke in the memory and experience of the animal the appropriate, prototypical image and to cause the appropriate reaction pattern.

It is evident to me, for instance, that dogs normally dream, probably in a manner very similar on basic levels to how human beings dream. Thus dogs can be attributed a degree of subjective life and sentience that includes, among other things, basic emotions and sense of well being and even individual identity. If dogs can dream, it is not so far fetched to think of cats, cows, whales, dolphins also all dreaming. In fact, dreaming has even been demonstrated in mice that have been running mazes--even the mental patterns of brain activity suggest that the shape of the maze itself. The established scientific fact of dreaming in many forms of animal would suggest strongly as well that animals retain complex memory associations, learn from experience, and are capable of applying and modifying critical cognitive imagery in relation to environmental cues in order to recognize new cues or to achieve a generalized sense of recognition of classes of things in the environment. Of course, all of this cognitive experience can be said, from an anthropocentric point of view, to be non-verbal or "preverbal." Animals also demonstrate different levels of problem solving capability and tool using capacity.

The development of fully symbolic language and mental functioning that is uniquely characteristic of human systems is really just an evolutionary stone's throw from this kind of mental functioning characteristic, more or less, by many other animals on earth. Once, after a rain, I could not but help be struck by the spontaneous actions of an earthworm in a puddle that was wreathing in pain from the bites of ants that had swarmed it. In its own life-world it was fighting for survival in a way that seemed desperate and determined.

In closing, it should be remarked that other faunal species and even many flora species have developed defensive and symbiotic mechanisms and forms that are in direct counter-adaptation to these kinds of animal processes of mental-image recognition and communication. For instance, mimicry and camouflage are two means that organisms have evolved to confuse and increase the noise level of such systems. Cryptic and obfuscating coloration can increase the noise of the figure-ground relationship that makes search image pattern recognition of a predator less successful. Mimicry suggests a kind of mechanical prevarication that makes it possible to trick a predator by evoking the wrong mental imagery in relation to an organism. Many plants have evolved round, colorful and sweet smelling flowers that prove to be very attractive to bees and humming birds and that achieve cross-pollination of the flower with other members of its species. It is clear that such counter-adaptation to animal systems have been important to the profile of evolution for a very long time.

Some have attributed the downfall of the Great Dinosaurs to the rise of the simple flowering perennial—though it is usually difficult in nature to tell the difference between the hen and the egg. In systems theory, the object is not to engage in hen or egg dialectics, but to see the hen and the egg as but two halves of a larger cycle of life. Bio-cybernetics concerns the self-organizational rise of informational systems in nature upon macroscopic levels of patterning of a complex epigenetic landscape. Natural intelligence, both human and non-human, can be attributed as a stochastic consequence of this pattern of long-term evolutionary development.

*****

The central object of this paper is to elaborate a general model of what can be referred to as human social ecology--the adaptations of human beings to groups and in groups, and the adaptation of groups to other groups and to the natural environment, and in particular, to the biological environment. Human beings are a biological species, subject to many of the same basic constraints as any other species--we have our requirements sufficient for survival and reproductive success. Human beings are also uniquely the creatures of culture--in other words, they have constructed for themselves worlds relatively independent of the forces that define natural patterning of life, and this culture has had a consequence in reshaping their relationship with the biological world in critical ways.

The model is based on several observations:

Humans are biological creatures preoccupied with basic issues of survival and reproductive success.

These basic preoccupations play out in social relationships and regulatory structures that govern these relationships, always symbolically and behaviorally mediated.

The symbolic and behavioral mediation of these preoccupations involves as well a naturalization of the regulatory structures and the relationships they reinforce as an institution that is equal to that of natural order.

In this case, in every case, achievement of success of the human social order is understood symbolically and enacted behaviorally as an act of nature, and this is frequently achieved at the expense of other biological life forms.

These preoccupations, and the socio-cultural institutions they give rise to, are relatively shortsighted, and the symbolic mediating structures (i.e. belief and behavior systems of the culture) essentially place blinders upon the people, such that they will tend, unless otherwise restricted, to carry forward their preoccupations to the tolerance limits of the environment in which they are situated, at which point, they will tend to degrade the environment and its natural adaptive equilibrium.

Such groups must then institute new productive means to restore or maintain an equilibrium that is dependent upon human intervention and activity, which is not as blind or shortsighted as the motivations that drive them, but which are governed by these self-same motivations such that the resulting success will tend to cause an expansion of the population beyond the tolerance limits afforded by the technology. At such a point, fissioning, migration or mobilization for invasion or massacres must occur that result in a restoring force to the population equilibrium.

Social ecology refers therefore to the capacity of human beings, by means of their social groups and their organizational adaptations, or social institutions, to achieve a degree of ecological adaptation and equilibrium that would not otherwise be possible by such groups without culturally mediated social organization. The clearest example of this kind of adaptation is in terms of functional social organization for purposes of production and reproduction of the society upon different levels. We can thus refer to the organization of labor into work groups to accomplish some common goals, such as the laying of a path or the building of a bridge across an otherwise impassable river. We can also refer to the socio-political and social structural organization of groups in a manner that promotes group cohesion and cooperation, and that allows for group defense or common action to be taken and that also provides a system of support and security of members of the group.

Social ecology becomes most apparent in the ritual-religious elaboration of systems of exchange and reciprocity between groups and subgroups, that may serve to mediate potentially conflictual relations, and to promote some level of peaceful or productive integration between groups, regulating competition and resource control in a manner that is mutually understood by all participants.

*****

Human symbolic ecology concerns the mediative relationships of symbolisms and symbolic behavior in human ecological adaptation. This kind of relationship has been demonstrated consistently in a number of levels for different cultural systems, and it is clear that symbol systems, particularly in contexts that are well rooted and concerned with the problematics of ecological adaptation, are quite effective, indeed necessary, for human adaptation to be achieved.

Archaeologists are reluctant to admit the problem of symbolic behavior into their models, because the evidence for such symbolic behavior is rare and exceptional in most archaeological sites, with a few noteworthy exceptions, such as the cave art of the Magdelanian in what is now France and Spain. But, like the denial of cannibalism as a behavioral adaptation of humans under extreme conditions, the absence of material evidence does not entail that symbolic behavior did not play a vital role in human evolution, and archaeologists may safely employ symbolic interpretations in their reconstructions even if no direct evidence can be used to support their claims.

A human systems model is based upon the fact that all human cultural systems exist primarily due to the functioning of the human brain in the mediation of environmental and social relationships. If this is true, and if it can be consistently demonstrated that the brain normally functions in a symbolic manner in relation to the environment, then a strong case of the use of symbolic interpretation in the archaeological evidence can be made.

I would claim that the origin of human cultural systems can only be fully understood if we take into account the symbolic mediational function that human intelligence and information processing played in adaptation to the environment and in social interrelationships. This took a critical form and permitted human beings, unlike any other animal, to build upon a foundation of experience, to explore, experiment and learn from encounters with the environment, and to express this knowledge in symbolic form that was available socially for others to use and coordinate their behavior appropriately. The original, proto-symbolic form was of course rudimentary and primitive compared to modern human standards, but it served effectively nonetheless to achieve a degree of cultural coherence, cognitive consonance and behavioral consistency of people within a natural and increasingly social environment.

The model of physical, or geographical ecology, stems from a basic sense of cognitive-behavioral dependence of the human being, and by extension the social group, upon a physical environment, or rather, upon maintaining organic relationships with a geographical setting that provides to the individual and the group a sense of place, orientation, adaptive security--it can be called a sense of "home" that entails as well a feeling of both belonging and of natural attachment to the behavioral settings. This deep seated sense of attachment is greater than the product of habit, as it appears that human symbolic capacity largely depends upon its projection and externalization or mapping upon a physical, material world, in order to achieve its sense of functional coherence.

There are different ways of conceiving this: worldview depends upon cognitive maps and "cultural" models that are geographically situated in real time and place in the world, there is consequently a need to continuously test and update one's internalized models and maps to be consistent with changes in ones social environment. On a more basic level, it is apparent that symbolic process that tends to project upon and learn from external stimuli develops a very natural sense of patterned attachment, or bonding, or what might be called psychoanalytically, as a fixation, upon a particular set of stable environmental relationship. This ties directly to a sense of separation and marginalization, versus inclusion and belonging, from a group, and I believe that the physical environment becomes to a great extent a symbolic extension of the group situation, and vice versa, the social group, including a sense of self, is largely shaped by environmental relationships. Episodes of relocation or dislocation therefore can precipitate separation anxieties and marginal episodes that relate to concerns with death and the existential insecurity that this evokes. We can almost say that there occurs a social personalization of the natural world.

A case can be made that the original function of symbolization was in fact spatial location and identification in a natural-social environment. Symbols mediate the boundaries of identity between person, place, experience, the social world, and the supernatural cosmos. Such symbolizations are commonly "spatial" in organization, and time is conceived as circular. Power which symbols contain, which pass through symbols, becomes centered in local places, and levels of power are concentric rings from the center. Such centers exist in the thoughts, in the being and body of the individual, in the home, in the public realm, in the state and the nation, and in the world and universe.

In regard to this spatialization of symbols, we can claim several points:

1. Symbols come to express and contain a spiritual energy invests the universe and can come to reside in certain places, persons or things which are centers of power.

2. Symbols as spatial metaphors of "place" mediate the boundary between the body and personhood and the state and social body, such that the state becomes embodied in the person, and state becomes the embodiment of the person.

3. Symbols as spatial metaphors of "centers" mediate the boundary between the state and the cosmos, such that the "humanized natural" world becomes the mapping of the supernatural world and the supernatural world becomes the projection of the state.

4. Symbols also spatially mediate the boundary between the individual, his/her body and personhood, and the cosmos, such that they orient and locate the individual spiritually in the cosmos and spiritually map the cosmos in the individual.

5. Symbols form multiple overlapping "network hierarchies" of relations which serve to locate power differentially in people, places, social relations and the cosmos.

6. Symbols serve an antistructural mediating function which allows for the manipulation of power relationships which are otherwise uncontrollable and can be expected to be emphasized or exaggerated when power relationships are inherently, structurally ambiguous.

7. Symbols come to coalesce into chains and complexes, which define topographically uneven regions of a shared, social "symbol scape" that form the multiple network-hierarchies. In these complexes we can recognize core and dominant symbols, distinguished from peripheral and antithetical symbols. We can distinguish as well between "basic" symbols and "elaborated" symbols.

Magic and Animistic religious beliefs were originally held by Western observers to be chaotic. Subsequently scholars have taken notice of an underlying order of such symbol systems, the parallelism between "microcosmos" and "macrocosmos" This parallelism between the state and the cosmos, occurs also between the macrocosm of the universe and microcosm of the person, as well as between the macrocosmos of the state and the microcosm of the person. Symbolisms mediate the relationships between spirit and matter, and their ritual manipulation as "receptacles of spirit" is a means of manipulating and regulating these boundaries. The manipulation and management of symbols through religious ritual and magic, is a form of power, or a "playing with power" that is supernatural.

Clive Kesseler notes a similar parallelism between "the body personal and the body politic" which is evident in the ritual performances of the Malay bomoh--"....the body is a realm, at once unitary and multiplex. Its various components are ideally coordinated and integrated, subordinated to a governing center, the palace of personality, the head. Since this conception of the body as a realm is not merely abstract and static, it permits illness or disorder within the person to be presented in political terms. Sickness...is regarded as the result of some imbalance or lack of regulation...and the fundamental political image of such disorder is anarchy or civil war--the absence of effective rule."

According to Kesseler, this parallelism is not simply a dualism, but a parallelism between the body, the state and the cosmos, and in this matter the state is the political embodiment and mediator of the power--"Hence, mediating between person and cosmos, the state, in its concretized conceptual form as the balai, provides the appropriately potent instrument or receptacle...for ritually manipulating and transferring powerful, and therefore potentially dangerous, spiritual essences."(p. 321) And if the social body constrains how we define the human body, as Mary Douglas would have it, it might also happen that the human body may become the metaphor for the state. The political idioms shared by a variety of symbolic complexes becomes the fundamental organizing idea or design of a culture.

To what extent do symbolic complexes, as partially integrated networks in the patterning of culture, overlap or are congruent with the ecological patterns of adaptation, as well as the historical patterns of borrowing and alteration. For instance, if we compare two cultures known to be historically related, that nonetheless diverged in different environments, would we be able on the basis of their comparison to select those aspects of symbolic complexes which remain basically untransformed. Alternatively, if we compare cultures which are known not to be related but which seem to share similar kinds of environments, or cultures which are distantly related and which share similar kinds of environments, though they presumably have never been in contact.

As J. S. van Leur quotes in full the working method of Werner Sombart in culture history as it applies to economic history , there is not reason that such a method could not be applied as well to other topical aspects of cultural symbolism. There are different analytical levels of complexes of meaning--the more primary the complex in which concrete individual phenomena are given a place, the more available it is to our senses and our understandings and the least equivocal in interpretation, but the more the complex of meaning is removed in terms of its inferred stylistic and interrelationality, the more it will depend upon its appropriate placement within a systemic framework, such that lower order complexes become subsumed within higher order complexes. Symbols also have an ecology about them, about their use and their meaning, one that was well described, if in somewhat overly functionalistic terms, by .Roy Rappaport.

The connection between symbols and the human world does not need to depend upon a functionalist, materialist or ecologist account. Symbols are "direct metaphors" of experience which allow both apperceptive disembodiment of the experience through the symbols incorporation and representation of that experience. It is therefore no great surprise that symbols should be widely employed by human beings to for the expression of relationships and significances which are either not directly available to experience, or for one reason for another, must be repressed from experience. Among all other things, symbols can stand for other symbols as well as for themselves--because they may mean so many different things, they may mean no one thing at all.

Georges Condominas has built upon the notion of the symbolic significance of production, or work, in social life, and the use of symbol systems in the regulation and expressive reiteration of the value of such production--thus agricultural ritual becomes an integral component of the technology of farming, which in turn becomes an intrinsically "social" as well as technical productive process, "..it is a meaningful series of interactions between social groups and the natural world. The field rituals that accompany each stage of agricultural labor form a kind of commentary on the productive process. Moreover, the rituals of work in the fields may be "performative," in that they call forth particular social groups to engage in activities such as planting and harvesting."

A common theme shared by symbolism in Southeast Asian civilization is the belief that all beings are hierarchically ranked according to relative proximity to the sacred. The higher one's rank, the more sacred "power" one possessed in one's being and one's place. Status was legitimized by one's sacred power and rank. Because of this rank, higher status people were regarded as more efficacious channels in tapping spiritual and supernatural powers, which could be distributed to the followers. This belief therefore defined leadership and the expectations which surrounded it in traditional Southeast Asia. Linked to this belief is a "circular conception of space in which potently charged centers were thought to radiate power outward and downward toward less-charged peripheries. Not surprisingly, higher-status people were found in centers--were, in fact, conceived to be centers--and were surrounded by people declining in proximity to power and hence in status as one moved outward."

Examples from Southeast Asia cultures clearly predate western influences and are rooted in a basic animistic spirit complex that has autochthonous origins in the region. It serves as an example of how human symbolic ecology can play a clear role in the social organization of the human environment. Our earliest forebearers were not simply responding by reflex, behavioral condition or instinct to a natural and often hostile environment, they were embodying this environment symbolically at the same time that they were infusing their natural world with a sense of "self" and social meaning. They were responding to their world with intelligence and deriving meaning from the world. Relations of power were therefore inherently a part of this emerging process of human adaptation.