Natural Systems Theory

by Hugh M. Lewis

http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/

Chapter Twenty

Ecological Systems of Human Culture

Human ecology on earth has been culturally mediated probably for the past 4 million years, albeit originally upon a very basic and "primitive" level. It can well be argued that the original "purpose" of human culture, of a system of shared belief and behavior, was ecological adaptation leading to social reproductive success. We can refer to the term "eco-culture" as the original primordial and "primitive" cultural patterning that served most directly and basically in this kind of adaptation.

Empirical evidence of cultural transmission and adaptation among Chimpanzee groups in Africa provide tantalizing clues to how our earliest hominid precursors, Lucy and her family, must have adapted in African world. One must wonder if we could leave the wild Chimp populations well enough alone in in their world, whether they might evolve their own "planet of the apes" civilization over the next few million years.

While the actual time frame for human cultural development will remain forever debated and controversial, we have strong artifactual evidence of entire stone tool assemblages by the time of Homo habilis, about 2 million years ago, an apparent transitional form between Australopithecus and our own Homo ancestors. Evidence strongly suggests human-made habitation, possible dress, and probably some band level of human social organization.

Louis Binford, in his well researched and seminal work Archaeological Frames of Reference, provides us well grounded evidence to suggest that at least by the mesolithic and neolithic culturally-mediated ecological adaptations were a significant factor of human systems development and of increasing human population growth in centers where there is technology based elaboration of alternative food-getting economies. Evidence of rock and cave art in Europe and Africa that dates well before the Neolithic, even to the late Paleolithic, suggests that human culture had already accomplished a long standing oral tradition that resembled many similar groups of people in modern historical times in the ethnographic record.

It does not take detailed survey and analysis of the Caves of France and Spain to realize that human culture of the periods that created these great works of art was strongly influenced by its natural environment, perhaps without the sense of neurotic alienation and anomie that modern Homo sapiens seems so prone to in his concrete and plastic cities.

The Eco-Cultural Model as a Basic Archaeological System

The model of eco-culture is proposed as the basic mechanism of human adaptation to a natural environment driving human evolution and cultural development in history. This arose within an evolutionary framework and promoted human survival and reproductive success. In the elaboration of this model, I have adopted a complex, multifactorial approach that triangulates the emergence of an adaptive cultural system clearly between environmental, social and symbolic-cognitive variables that permitted flexibility and plasticity of human adaptive response. I have striven to fit this model into an eco-evolutionary framework. In general, I find the ecological variables and principles used to describe other animal populations to be generally applicable to the description of human populations as well. On the other hand, cultural modes of adaptation have also permitted a new level of cultural selection that has metabiotically influenced the environment in a counteradaptive and co-evolutionary manner.

            Searching for the eco-evolutionary foundations of human systems as the basis for interpreting archaeological systems entails the elaboration of a characteristically human mode of culturally mediated adaptation to an environment. The human relationship to its natural environment can be said to be metabiotic in a sense that there are counteradaptational trends occurring at multiple levels. To a great extent, the brain as an organ of refined awareness and planning became a remarkable counteradaptational trait-complex that facilitated wide-ranging adaptation and tremendous cultural plasticity. At all times during our evolution, our ancestors have had to cope with and somehow overcome the variables and extremes presented by the environment. The ecological adaptation of human populations and the cultural processes mediating this pattern of adaptation, became the functional foundation for human survival and success in the world. Domestication of many species of plants and animals, and the subsequent breeding of different breeds of these plants and animals, has been a deliberate example of the cultural selection and mediation of the metabiotic framework of human systems.

In a very similar way, cultural patterning has also mediated the adaptation and patterning of the human to the natural environment, and has entailed that humans have the general plasticity to adapt to an almost infinite range of cultural patterns and processes. Because these processes are so basic to our nature, it enables the enculturated or implanted forms to assume a compelling force that is almost instinctive or impulsive in character, and that appears to be very "naturalized." The capacity of human adaptive flexibility seems to be primarily and mostly a phenotypic response to a generalized genotypic trait complex. We can say that instinctual patterns have been checked, and to some extent probably sublimated and modified, for the purpose of the post-natal acquisition of cultural trait patterns. Within this complex cultural framework, humans must seek many of the same kinds of adaptive strategies and patterns of subsistence that characterize other animal groups. In particular, I believe, humans have developed intraspecific patterns of social competition, symbolically mediated, that functions at both the individual and the group levels. These patterns are remarkably parallel to patterns of instinct-driven interspecific competition among many kinds of animals, except that among humans these patterns are independent of instinct and instead appear to be symbolic-driven or symbolically-culturally dependent upon "artifactual" modes of expression. Especially, I believe, the intraspecific capacity for human aggression and violence is remarkable and possibly unique to human beings. I accept the hypothesis that it is the unchaining of humankind from the closed-world of instinctual determination of behavior had the consequence of rendering aggression and possibly violent behavior without innate controls, and thus being susceptible and quite malleable to cultural shaping and sublimation. I do not believe that aggression and violence are the only possible forms of motivational force that humans possess.

The "artifactual" modes of expression of symbolic mediation of human adaptive behavior is the potential archaeological hook onto this problem of reality, and it stems from the possibility of being able to correctly and accurately interpret the material evidence found at numerous and various sites in terms of the possible patterns of behavior and significant cultural mediational factors and motivations that might account for the non-random or isotrope distributions of assemblages at significant archaeological sites. If most skeletal remains are found with associated burial items or with a relatively intact sub-cranial skeleton, but a site is found in which only skulls appear that are broken open at the magnum, this suggests that some other kind of ritual or survival performance was occurring than a burial or even a roof collapse of a cave. It suggests some form of violence involving decapitation and possibly cannibalism. This type of behavior would not necessarily fall outside of the expected normal range of variation of human behavior patterning, and though it may be controversial because it offends modern tastes and sensibilities, the bulk of the ethnographic and archaeological evidence lends credence to an hypothesis of some form of cannibalism occurring. When cannibalism becomes related to either patterns of warfare or alternatively, survival under conditions of famine, then the case for interpreting the evidence in this manner becomes even more powerful.

I believe that in this kind of example, the archaeological evidence and conceptual systems should remain fundamentally neutral and objective in interpreting the evidence. Cannibalism would not be an unrealistic nor an unlikely possibility, though it appears today to be a form of protein-consumption almost universally taboo, it has been documented from first hand evidence and it has been demonstrated to occur at low frequency in modern populations under certain specific sets of conditions. This type of example is an important case for demonstrating how archaeological evidence can be made to bend to modern biases without an objective sense of asking hard questions of the evidence being given its full weight. This is not the only kind of example in which this form of distortion appears to occur.

It must be understood that the basic patterning of culture as this developed in its first phases was toward a generalizing, non-specializing pattern that permitted human groups a great capacity for niche expansion and adaptive radiation across a broad range of habitats and environments. This range became greater and greater as cultural processes and adaptations came to increasingly mediate the relationship between humans and their environment and between humans and one another. It ultimately allowed humans near global access, but global access was probably not completely achieved until the last 30,000 years. It is remarkable though that very wide ranging adaptation was achieved by Homo erectus as early as 2 million BP, and it is possible that a partial range of this adaptation may have included winter and subarctic type adaptations to conditions of severe cold as well as the evident capacity to navigate significant water barriers. Between Homo erectus and the rise of modern Homo sapiens, we have a long run way of aggregative cultural development in which cultural adaptation was based upon mostly crude stone technology, incorporating fire, some form of makeshift and permanent sheltering, and probably the processing of hides for clothes. Some form of primitive human language was undeniably an intrinsic part of this early cultural complex, which would have involved gesture-gesticulation as much as aural-oral expression, and it would also have probably entailed a kind of language system that was grammatically reduced to bare essentials and that was largely context dependent in its expression. Somewhere at the end of this long run-way, when the cultural airplane started to lift-off the ground, we see evidence, within the last 100,000 years, of human burials complete with aesthetic and symbolic (ritual religious) forms, suggesting some belief system associated with animism and spirit-worlds.

Eco-cultural Models

All archaeological systems theory can be found to involve and operate on three basic levels of human functional adaptation. The first level involves the environmental relationships that a society must maintain in order for it to achieve survival and growth, being fundamentally dependent upon the intake of other animals and plants for energy and essential amino acid. The second level deals with the social interactions between individuals, and the third level deals with the necessary and unavoidable problem of the symbolic or psychological organization of reality. At the same time, levels and units of analysis must take into account both the situation of the individual member of a group, as a quasi-independent player, and the superorganic situation of the culture and social group as a whole, as possibly a corporate social entity. Thus every archaeological system we can think of or encounter in the field, should demonstrate significant evidence of this kind of system, variable in its manifestations and differentiation into almost an endless variety of form and content. The purpose of any cultural system, at whatever level upon which it is analyzed, is to permit and promote the adaptive functioning and equilibrium of the individual and of the group of which the individual is a part. This purpose follows the fundamental biological imperatives of people as an animal species--reproductive success and survival under all conditions. The cultural imperatives of the group tend to follow these same biological imperatives, only transferred to the group level in a corporate sense. Furthermore, the cultural imperative tends to follow another set of secondary objectives, which are typically, uniquely and universally human: 1. The achievement of maximal cultural integration of a group. 2. The achievement of an adaptive equilibrium based upon the continuity and survival of the group, even at the expense of its individual constituency.

If we push our eco-cultural model of anthropogenesis back to the very beginning, possibly even before the time of Lucy, we will find the rudimentary basis for all these factors in operation. We will find in other words, a critical interplay between environmental-ecological variables, social patterning and presymbolic forms articulating between the individual and the group, and driving human evolution in a direction that made cultural selection an increasingly important direction of human survival and reproductive success. I would argue that the basic model was there from the very beginning, and took its original shape in an adaptive regime totally unlike anything that followed or what we know today, conditioned as we are through cultural blinders.

The following kind of model of eco-culture is therefore proposed as a general template for understanding all human cultural patterning in situ. We can take any cultural system that we encounter and analyze this system in terms of its three main components:

Usually, this tripartite structure is represented archaeologically in terms of a functional pyramid, with the ecological and material substrate at the base, the social and organizational intermediate structure, and the symbolic-ideological superstructure. The implication of such a functional pyramid is that the relations between the base and apex of the pyramid are determinative, and material-ecological relationships therefore can be said to have causal priority over social organizational structures and ideological systems.

In showing this alternate representation of a similar system, I put each of the three main components of an eco-cultural model at the vertices of an equilateral triangle, and demonstrate the inter-determinative nature of the relationships occurring between the different systems. By doing so I wish to demonstrate that I believe there is no necessary causal priority, no hen and egg order, within such a model. Secondly, I wish to demonstrate that the system must have emerged eventually as a full blown system by which human groups achieved adaptive success in a broad range of natural environments. This system automatically incorporates both the individual and the group level, the individual being represented and correlated with the symbolic organization of experience, and the group equated with the social organization of human behavior and belief. There is therefore no basis in this model to place conceptual priority over the individual or the group, or to stress exclusively either at the expense of the other. The spheres of relationships that these three sets of dimensions of the eco-cultural model encompass also overlap in the middle, so it is evident that it is impossible to draw a strict line of demarcation between where one kind of influence might leave off and another take over.

The model has three main operating components or subsystems that operate as interharmonic periodic oscillator mechanisms in relation to one another, and hence serve as constraints to the state-path trajectory of the system as a whole. The three components are:

1. Individual human adaptation and adjustment, entailing meeting basic biological needs as well as cultural defined appetites, and includes invariably symbolic aspects of the human organization of behavior and knowledge.

2. Social organization, relation and process, which includes both intragroup relations and between group relations. In a biological sense we define the primary group as the family, but this is largely culturally defined and varies considerably in terms of kinship and social definitions of roles and social identities.

Thus mating patterns and patterns of social exchange for reproductive purposes becomes important to consider, and these are commonly a point of substantial cross-cultural variation of pattern. The secondary group would be defined as the total framework of extended social relations beyond the level of the family group that serves to integrate members of the family, and the family as a whole unit, into some larger field and system of social relationships. If family patterns were variable cross-culturally, it appears that secondary group formations, often regulated by indirect constraint and sanctioning involving ritual behavior and stereotypical belief systems, have been even more variable and non-constant. We may risk a generalization in this regard: the greater the distance of social relationship from ego, the greater the inherent insecurity and "entropy" that is attached to that relationship. It can be seen that the rise of state-formations or of secondary social group formations that had a strong sense of corporate institutionalization depended immensely upon the capacity to stabilize and render less insecure familial social formations at the primary level. This entailed inducing some degree of exogamy/endogamy restrictions, enforcement of rules of monogamy or restrictive polygamy, formalization of marriage rituals, rules of locality and inheritance, as well as defining in an explicit sense the roles and behavior appropriate to different categories of persons upon a primary level. On another level of development, it would have entailed the stratification of social primary social groups into intermediate social formations, often hierarchically organized in relation to status and resource availability.

3. Environmental relationships, which includes meeting biological needs for individuals and the environmental impact of human social organization and population. In a non-restrictive sense environmental relationships, which in saturated systems involves circumscription locally or regionally of resources and ecological constraints or limiting factors, would also come to entail factors of intraspecific competition and social circumscription of the environment as well.

In the explication of this model, it is evident that all three sets of factors must be taken into account in a coordinated manner simultaneously. We cannot exclusively emphasize one or only two sets of factors, either social, environmental or symbolic, to the exclusion of the other sets of factors at the same time.

The contention of this basic model is that it is fundamental to all human systems, and if we wish to understand the structural patterning of any group or arrangement of people in the world, or alternatively, of the assemblage distribution of their archaeological remains, then it is important to at least attempt to take into account all three sets of factors and their interrelationships at the same time.

It is evident in such a model that causal priority can be given to any one of the three sets of factors, or to some intermediate combination of the three. It is also evident that such a model inherently invites multi-dimensional analysis and reinterpretation of the same body of evidence from different angles of understanding. We can seek to explore the ecological and environmental relationships implied by a particular assemblage pattern and its composition. At the same time, we can also ask questions regarding its possible social implications and its symbolic implications. We may ask, for instance, from a symbolic standpoint, what kind of knowledge was necessary in order to produce and use the things represented in the assemblage. What does the distributive pattern of the assemblage tell us about the kinds of activities that might have resulted in such a distribution, as opposed to some other possible distribution. If such activities could be inferred, then what again would be the functional knowledge implied by such activities. What would the actors need to know and how would they have been thinking about what they were doing. Furthermore, from a symbolic standpoint, if we can get at the knowledge base implicit to an assemblage and its composite artifacts, we can go one step further and consider the kind of symbolic organization of experience that might be suggested by the implicit knowledge base.

The approach to any archaeological or anthropological problem, in terms of elaborating a sufficient eco-cultural theory of a system, can systematically query such a model in terms of its total dimensionally and in terms of the direction of determination the possible relationships may entail. We can see thus to fill in the blanks of a kind of grid:

By use of the term "symbolic" in this work, I do not wish to suggest the looser and more general use of the term implying mostly affective and metaphorical associations of meaning around some symbol. By symbolic I refer to a specific order and structural patterning of human cognition, perception and behavioral response, organized in a specific manner and always exhibiting some form of external or extra-somatic, material manifestation. Symbolic forms always also have some social communicative and integrative function. The social aspects of symbolism, like the social aspects of language, which is the principle human medium for symbolic process, cannot be ignored in light of the psychological aspects only. In this sense, as with all biological life forms, we can say that there is no individual human being who can exist outside of the framework of a social group or a population. Individuals can be isolated from social life, but they remain in a fundamental sense constructed by their social identity.

It is also the case that we cannot ever clearly isolate one set of factors from the others. They come all wrapped up as a package so to speak, and this package is what we refer to as cultural patterning. Enough variables pertain in each of the areas and relational dimensions as to end up with an infinite number of possible patterns, and hence no two cultural patterns end up being alike.

Cultural Anthropogenesis

Establishing the Base-line for Archaeological Prehistory

Anthropogenesis concerns the explanation for the rise and primary function of human cultural patterning. Without a doubt, human cultural patterning arose as an adaptive complex of traits that facilitated human survival and reproductive success, and this adaptive complex was probably from the start capable of spanning a number of alternative niches and ranges of territory. It is important, if we are to get at archaeological systems theory, to push the conceptual modeling process back to the earliest possible point in the record. Any baseline short of an anthropogenesis model would presuppose the existence of one or more advanced cultural or human traits, that in turn must be accounted for.

Many models of anthropogenesis have been put forward over the years, and I believe it is a favorite past-time of boneologists to speculate about the original causes of cultural patterning when they are not engaged actually in the detailed analysis of their specimens. Such models are really just-so stories, and I doubt we will ever gather enough evidence from the ground from the earliest phases of hominid evolution to figure it all out. I must begin with a model of anthropogenesis within which to frame basic models of archaeological systems, because these provide the only analytic baseline that we can have for setting the direction and explanation of all that came after.

Developing a cogent and realistic model of anthropogenesis therefore provides an analytical and synthetic baseline by which to frame the basic problems of anthropological inquiry, the rise of human cultural systems in adaptation to a natural environment. In general, we may say that original proto-cultural adaptations of hominids offered a rather narrow and relatively invariable base-line for human cultural development and adaptation, but the earliest precursors were sufficient enough to permit relatively broad niche expansion/generalization that crossed multiple trophic levels. Positive natural selection for cultural trait complexes entailed as well selection for cultural differentiation and variation that served to increase the basic cultural platform from a very early point in time.

The only constraints that I place upon the development of such a model of anthropogenesis are that it must conform to certain known or understandable principles of ecology and evolutionary theory, or what I refer to as an eco-evolutionary framework. At the same time, it is also important that it is coordinate to and not contradictory with the information that is known about human adaptation and the hominid fossil record.

In regard to the first point, I will assert that human cultural adaptation arose within an evolutionary context that favored positive selection toward a specific trait complex which comprised a suite of polymorphic traits that are used to uniquely characterize Homo sapiens today, and that we can find evident in other fossil specimens of the hominid line.

This model is based upon certain presuppositions:

1. There has been an unbroken line of biological continuity between our first protohominid ancestors and modern human beings. This line may not have been a straight line, but it appears to have originated in central Eastern Africa and periodically extended out throughout the Old World and eventually into the New World over the past 100,000 years. This line, by best fit approximation by the fossil record, appears to have been from Australopithecus afarensus to Australopithecus africanus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus to Archaic Homo sapiens (including Homo neanderthalensus) to Homo sapiens sapiens. Whatever the exact sequence and succession taken, these appear to be clearly allopatric species with some periods of sympatric differentiation (robust lines specialized towards lower trophic levels appear to have failed, perhaps in interspecific competition (bears and cats) and intraspecific competition (gracile versus robust forms). Regardless, effective stone tool technologies appear to have developed early, at least by Homo habilus, and more likely with earlier forms of Australophithecus. Once achieved, stone technology became the basis for further cultural development which depends upon environmental mediation, sharing and transmission of cultural traits both horizontally and vertically.

Mitochondrial RNA models suggest period out-migrations from Africa, possibly on a regular basis, perhaps as frequently as every 100,000 or so years, or even more frequently, and suggest that some of these may have led to partial replacement of previous inhabitants of areas by new populations and groups.

2. Cultural trait complexes arose as an adaptative response to the natural world, and permitted positive selection of those populations who exhibited these trait complexes. Cultural trait patterns would not have arisen and cannot be originally explained except in an evolutionary context. Biological systems permit no trait complexes to evolve that do not have some form of adaptive-reproductive efficacy and advantage. Once a fundamental cultural trait complex developed that can be defined as uniquely anthropological, cultural patterning became an unbroken feature of human evolutionary development until today.

3. There occurred a fundamental form of systems feedback (defined by my eco-cultural model) between human evolutionary development and cultural selective mechanisms that resulted in the progressive development of the key anthropological trait complex in human beings (larger brains, language, manual dexterity, prolonged infant dependency, human sexuality and aggression) which in turn promoted more rapid cultural development.

4. Cultural trait patterning permitted greater flexibility and adaptability to human populations, through evolved individual phenotypic trait plasticity, that permitted human populations to overcome a larger range of environmental variation and fluctuation. The original trait adaptations were no longer contextually dependent upon the original environmental-selective contexts in which they originally arose.

5. Early cultural successes of hominid populations led to a pattern of saturation-oversaturation of human systems upon the ecological and environmental frameworks in which these systems operated. Early success would have permitted, in other words, rapid population growth that would have saturated all available ecological habitats/niches, and would have resulted in pressures towards niche expansion and adaptive radiation. People came to saturate their systems, at the levels upon which they were trophically-culturally adaptive. We may properly speak of cultural-trophic systems of adaptation. All human systems, at whatever their cultural-trophic levels, tended to maximize and saturate their available resource systems, and therefore tended to exist at levels of elevated K.

6. Such early success would have created secondary social evolutionary contexts in which cultural selection factors played a more important role than natural selection factors. This came to be expressed in increasing levels of intersocial competition and transculturation processes that favored greater cultural selection.

Negative Selection Factors & Consequences

It is at the same time important to look at basic processes of human evolution and cultural development in terms of the negative selection regimes that probably had the greatest constraining and shaping effects upon human populations. I will rank in order of decreasing importance those factors of negative selection that most greatly resulted in human mortalities:

1. Diseases due to bacterial borne or viral infection, malnutrition and food poisoning, as well as a variety of untreated medical conditions leading to death.

2. Human conflict and violence.

3. Natural disasters & calamities such as drought and starvation; exposure to the elements.

4. Predation by other species.

It may well have been that early in hominid evolution predation by large carnivores was a considerable risk in the natural environment. Once hominids achieved the technological skill levels necessary, they for the most part systematically eliminated this kind of threat as a major selective factor. Of the factors above, sets 1 and 2 can be lumped together as part of relatively density independent environmental factors--the selective pressure from these kinds of elements would tend, it seems to affect entire populations across the board. Factors 2 and 4 are issues that relate specifically to density dependent factors of intraspecific and interspecific competition. It is clear that humans, as predators themselves, would have systematically eliminated through competitive exclusion any other predators at the top of the trophic pyramid.

Throughout human history and prehistory, by far microphages and microbes have been the leading and most significant factor of death of human beings, and therefore has been the leading constraint and agency in the controlling of human populations. It strikes me that human conflict and violence has taken a considerable toll through human prehistory and history. Evidence of the historical record alone confirms this indictment on humanity.

Diseases have not really been treated as a significant factor of human evolution or of our cultural strategies of human development, even though it has long been recognized that they have played a dramatic role in human population dynamics in human history. And yet the importance of disease must have transcended cultural and historical contexts, and must have had evolutionary implications as well. In a direct sense, it cannot be said that the rise of human brains and an anthropomorphic trait complex had any causal connection to disease patterning and adaptation. It appears for the most part that cultural development and human evolution has continued and proceeded in spite of widespread disease selection and not because of it. But there is a sense that certain populations have developed through time genetic resistance to some kinds of diseases, such as cycle cell anemia in central Africa that increases tolerance for malaria infection. I do believe that cultural systems developed though at a fairly early time certain kinds of patterns that can be characterized as preventive and infective cultural responses to prevalent and frequent diseases, especially those relating to malnutrition. Much of this became "magical" depending upon the system of rationalization for disease causation and explanation that was adopted. Some of it became medicinal in a homeopathic sense that herbal remedies were sought and found, through trial and error, in the natural environment. Some of this was spiritual and religious that involved communication and invocation of supernatural spirit forces residing in the natural world. Even so, some of it may also have taken the form of cultural proscriptions, sanctions and taboos that served to develop ecologically based solutions for dealing with the possible transmission and infection of diseases.

At this stage it is impossible to say exactly if the proclivity to human violence and aggression is genetically predetermined or if it is merely culturally conditioned. I believe that it has been an unhappy combination of both sets of factors that has lead to an increased potential of human destructiveness and capacity for violence. Civilization has made humankind no less violent, and evidence suggests just the opposite may be true, that in fact primitive "hunting and gathering" forefathers may have been inherently less violent than modern human beings have learned to be. Ethnographic evidence supports the contention that low-level or low-intensity primitive warfare was a chronic and common aspect of intersocial relations throughout the world and throughout the period of human history, at least. Again, the models we adopt to explain this aspect of human social life remains open to debate. It is not necessary that we explain every aspect of human reality, at least not right away, in order to treat those related issues that remain theoretically relevant. It is enough to acknowledge that it is generally so, though hardly without important exceptions.

Natural disasters and other calamities like long periods of drought, flooding, forest fires, etc., that affected not just human beings but the natural environments in which they dwelled, would also have been critical issues in their lives. I believe that though at times these may have claimed considerable numbers of people, these kinds of cataclysmic events would have been relatively infrequent and rare compared to lower level and more common patterns of warfare, malnutrition and infection by virulent diseases.

In understanding the role that negative selective factors played in human evolution and cultural development, it is important to consider the possible adaptive and ecological consequences that such chronic negative selection factors would have had upon human systems. One of the first and most basic responses would have been the drive for humans to reconstitute (regroup) themselves after significant natural calamity, and to almost automatically increase rates of birth following such events. Human population growth rates would thus be continuously held in high gear, possibly not only in response to such events, but in anticipation of similar events in the future. If experience taught a people that half of all children born would die before they came of age to reproduce, there would be a premium placed upon the maximization of a women's reproductive capacity during her life-time. Sexual attractiveness and human sexuality would have encouraged this tendency. Hominid females would have started their reproductive careers as early as possible, and would probably have continued these until as late as possible. Birth spacing would have been at least one year or more apart.

Another consequence of facing challenges of natural or human induced negative selection would have been a need to socially and culturally sanction and reinforce what could be considered to be naturally precarious human relationships. If long-term survival for any one human being was remote, there would have been a premium placed upon fostering cultural conditions and social contexts that would serve to maximize these long-term chances, and to reinforce relational patterns that were cultural defined as adaptive and beneficial for a group. Group identity would have been given priority over individual identity in such systems, and the social aspects of human beings would have been promoted over those idiosyncratic aspects of human nature. This is not to say that group identity would have been necessarily coercive or intolerant of a wide range of human variation of behavior, or even occasionally of atomistic social conditions. It may have demanded an extreme degree of social flexibility and periodic or chronic atomization of nuclear groups. But it would have promoted an inherent dependency of the human being upon the group and upon the cultural system that the group possessed. This dependency was reinforced from earliest infancy, and continued throughout life. At the same time, social relationships were always therefore ambivalent, risk prone and occasionally ambiguous. I will not say that altruism was a valued trait--I believe altruism, like ideologies of sacrifice and righteousness, arises in secondary cultural systems. I believe social relationships were fundamentally opportunistic from an ego-centered perspective, except that anthropological ego was inherently socio-centrically decentered in a larger field of social relations that had to be "played," manipulated and navigated to one's own best advantage.

Neither is this to claim that genuine bonds of love and care did not frequently arise among our primitive ancestors. A great deal of social life depends upon the capacity of human beings to empathize with the condition of others (social self consciousness) and to act in ways to alleviate such suffering. Such bonds may or may not have become attenuated by circumstances of chronic disease or high infant mortality or famine. Attitudes of tolerance must have accompanied in equal measure attitudes of intolerance. Some of the earliest and most poignant evidence is found in Neanderthal burial remains and in the apparent care-taking of diseased or disabled individuals that demonstrates a sense of genuine fidelity and devotion, and a strong sense of separation at death.

In developing basic models of cultural systems theory in relation to the human past, here it is only necessary to mention a few basic constraining principles.

1. Morphological tissue and trait development within an evolutionary context appears to be discretely continuous in the direction favored by positive selection. All other directions will be negatively selected.

2. Convergent evolutionary trends in functional morphology reveals consistently that traits streamline for particular modes of adaptation in particular regional contexts. Certain kinds of design configurations can be considered to be optimally efficient under certain prevailing and consistent conditions, and it is expected that species will arrive at these design configurations, as secondary derivative characteristics of their basic morphological pattern, if given enough time. Wing structure in the air is an important convergent design trend, as are fin and tail structures in the water. Vertical or horizontal tail fins distinguish sea mammals from fish, but both sets of fins accomplish very parallel and similar kinds of results in the water. We must thus ask in this regard what gets accomplished by a leg structure favoring flat rear feet, bipedality and free gangly arms. If we look at other bipedal or partially bipedal animals in nature, we find an interesting mix. Tyrannousaurs and other carnivorous predatory dinosaurs appear to have been bipedal, with the front set of arms becoming either hooks for slashing and catching prey, or, in the case of the big guys, becoming largely vestigial and useless. Wingless birds are basically bipedal, and if we look at such birds we find that the characteristic they share in common is the capacity to run and walk along the ground in an efficient manner.

3. Trait complexes can be said to co-evolve polymorphically, such that selection will tend to favor discrete variables of an entire complex, rather than point-specific kinds of traits.

4. Trait variation will covary enough at any one time in an on-going genetically breeding population such that there will always be a range of variation for any specific or discrete trait characteristic, and for entire complexes as well. Selection will tend to push trait characteristics in one direction or another, a process referred to as character displacement.

5. Character displacement represents a normal form of evolutionary oscillation and drift in heterozygous populations, and such displacement can be associated with trends called niche shift, including niche expansion or niche specialization or niche differentiation.

6. Extreme environmental fluctuations, or alternatively, high levels of interspecific or intraspecific competition or predation, or alternative environmental degradation due to oversaturation, will tend to push the genetic profile of a population in one direction or another, tending to bottleneck the population in the long run.

These kinds of evolutionary constraints favor either allopatric or sympatric speciation, as well as, in the long run, regular taxon cycles. These constraints are applicable to all eukaryotic, multi-cellular organisms, and are especially applicable to the Kingdom animalia, of which of course hominids are a part.

The focus then in understanding these operating conditions is to account for the evolution of a uniquely human trait-complex that can account in a minimal sense for the rise of basic cultural patterning. This trait complex is what is clearly evident in the early hominid fossil remains, or that are inferable from modern human or primate populations on the basis of presumed common morphology and basic behavior.

Positive Selection Factors influencing Human Systems

It is worthwhile to consider the full range of positive selection factors that may have played a part in the evolutionary development and emergence of human systems. In a sense, what made human cultural evolution unique and independent of biological evolution would have been the influence of a complex suite of intervening factors that encouraged and promoted the positive selection of a unique anthropomorphic trait complex, within situ of an emerging cultural context.

In this I have recognized various possible forms of selection that may have been relevant, such as natural selection, possibly involving environmental, ecological or metabiotic selective factors; social selection factors, including possibly birth order, parentage or lineage, mate choice and reproductive selection factors, and also including possible forms of sociability and cooperative networks that enhanced an individual's, and by extension, a group's opportunities for resources and survival; and cultural selection factors, which would have included as well factors relating to symbolic cognition, culturally modified behavior, and cultural ecological adaptations including the ability to make and use a wide range of tools, and general problem solving and experiential intelligence that goes along with this.

It is not important to wax lyrical on all of these kinds of possible selection factors, except to mention that such factors would have had to have operated consistently and continuously in such a manner as to promote positive human cultural and biological development. It is my opinion that these sets of factors would have been coalesced more or less into a cultural system that came then to be defined within the framework of consanguineal kin-groups. Thus, different configurations of these factors would have worked differently for different groups in different contexts, and this would have been the basis for cultural patterning and variability that emerged between groups. In such a framework, systems of positive selection factors would have operated at a group and intergroup level and led possibly to between group competition that would in the long run advantage or favor one group over another. This would have formed the basis therefore for differential cultural evolution favoring more efficient cultural selection factors over less adequate ones.

Cultural and Natural Anthropogenesis

Models of cultural anthropogenesis are typically used to explain the reasons for the rise of humankind within an evolutionary context. Resort is typically made to any number of distinctive human traits in the search for some key prime-mover in the development of the capacity for human culture. Generally, what is ignored is the evolutionary context itself that selected for such traits, and the fact that such traits arose as a complex, as a kind of functional system, that was positively reinforcing of the complex as a whole. Culture, I would claim, was a by-product of this system, and big-brains was one of the key components that was selected for and that in turn favored increasing cultural selection.

A good part of the story is in place, for it is clear that bipedalism was one of the earliest, uniquely hominid traits to have developed. Of course, this freed our hands and arms to be used for other things than load-bearing or hanging from trees. One of the important things free arms provided was a means to carry things. I believe that it gave to humans, who are otherwise somewhat awkward in their gait, a superb capacity for walking long distances. And it makes sense that while our earliest ancestors were engaged in walking from one point to another, they may have attempted to carry things with them. Items they liked or found useful in one location could be transported to other locations and hence could continue to be used. I do not even think it was important that stones were the main thing they carried. I would suspect that they found wood and bone items easier to use and manipulate and mold. And when they walked, they potentially could have walked very long distances, setting distant landmarks on the horizon as their objective targets. Of course free hands meant they could do other things as well. It might have given them an advantage in throwing. Throwing could have been stones, or it could have been clubs or even make-shift spears. I do not think it would have taken out diminutive Australopheticus ancestors very long to figure out that a long straight stick could be thrown in the direction of its axis and have greater penetrating power. Rocks were good no doubt, especially in frightening away animals. But spears were useful if their aim was not to scare away animals but to bring them to the ground. It is common lore in the jungle that a spear, instantly produced from a small bush, is the best protection from an attacking jaguar or other large cat, and I believe our early Australophithecoid ancestors probably feared most large cats who stalked their prey in silence.

Of course, with Australopithecine, more ape-like than human, we see a creature that was still very much dictated to and determined by natural selection. Hence this genus's adaptive radiation was confined to a band about the African heartland, a crescent, that may have extended into the Middle East. It underwent some degree of sympatric evolution, always tending, it seems to specialize in the direction of herbivory and more robust forms resembling more Gorillas than Chimpanzees. The capacity to find niches based upon a vegetable rather than a mixed diet would entail feeding at a lower trophic level where there might have been less competition for resources, and at the same time yielded, over all, greater returns for the energy expended. It was a low-energy adaptation, one that always ran into an evolutionary deadend.

It was apparent therefore that early hominid species spanned several trophic levels in their diversified niche adaptations. The basic trophic-niche adaptation of the hominid line can best be described as a generalized omnivore. It was this wide niche spectrum capacity that permitted hominids the adaptive edge over other kinds of animals. It demanded a form of greater mobility, without sacrificing other aspects of anatomical design, which entailed perhaps that bipedalism was the most efficient mode of trait adaptation for this kind of broad-spectrum niche adaptation.

There does seem to be a linear progression of bigger brains from Australopithecus to Homo habilus, who shows the first signs of very rough and primitive stone tool technology featuring flakes from a core. The tools were not large or heavy, but neither was Homo habilus very large. Selection was definitely in favor of larger brains at this time, and it is clear therefore that a rudimentary eco-cultural complex was already worked out beforehand.

But before we can hope to answer the question of anthropogenesis within a conceptually adequate framework, we need first to answer the question of culture to begin with. I have used the term human cultural patterning to distinguish what I consider to be the evidence and patterned manifestations of the effects of cultural organization of behavior within an environment.

"Culture" has been used commonly in a reified sense as something that is presumed to be true, to exist as a whole, a priori to its manifestation. Culture therefore has the form of a "thing" that exists independently of any particular manifestation or human agency by which it becomes articulated. The truth is this "nationalistic" conception of culture is anthropologically naïve and unrealistic, especially in frameworks where nationalistic pretensions did not exist. Because we use a single term of German people, we may assume erroneously that all German people are culturally homogenous and alike. Nationalistic culture indeed promotes this kind of uniformity and homogeneity of principle, for instance by imposing a standard dialect of language that is functionally promoted in schools, in government and through the media.

It must be understood that our prototypical people were without nation-states or national identities by which to define themselves and chauvinistically promote their own culture. This is not to say that such early groups did not have a full-fledged sense of themselves as "people." If an empirical definition of culture is based upon the concept of sharing and reciprocity, and the achievement of a complex kind of consensus of variable patterning, then to the extent that groups of people were able to achieve such a cultural consensus among and between themselves, they might potentially have come to conceive of themselves in terms of a "whole" or a single group of people who were culturally distinct. Thus, an undeveloped tribe could be a kind of nation (or to be more politically correct, an ethno-nation) if a part of their cultural patterning determined that this kind of status attribution was an important component of their behavior and attitudes. It strikes me that such an identity would become most significant to people in contexts where they shared space, and potentially resources, with other groups of people who were perceived as different and as fundamentally in competition with them. Thus, a tribe would become a national concern primarily if and when it ran into trouble with another, neighboring tribe.

Most human groupings that were at least in a minimal sense culturally integrated, would not have existed in a larger environmental and social vacuum, and hence the resulting cultural patterning would have been critically influenced by direct or indirect acculturative pressures. Hence, most cultural groupings would have had some sense of a larger social and cultural history in relation to other similar or different groupings. Only anomalous isolated groups could exist for an indefinite time in that kind of culture historical vacuum. Such groups would have been bound for extinction eventually unless they somehow became reintegrated with the larger confluence of humanity.

A general pattern is evident therefore that tells us that general acculturative influence derivative of cultural sharing and variable reciprocal interactions was probably always an important influence upon resulting cultural patterns and adaptations achieved by different groups of people. This influence may have been nothing more than the general restriction of a group to a specified home range or territory, by which restriction or delimitation a cultural grouping was constrained to certain ranges of environmental niches and kinds of adaptation, which would in turn have influenced the social and symbolic patterning of the group in critical ways as well. Such a group could only move out of its own home range at considerable risk, and would have to be able to be welcomed by another group or alternatively, would have to make war with some other group, in order to acquire the home-range of the other group or be incorporated by another group.

Population growth patterns in relation to ranges and areas of occupation demonstrate that a population will increase in density in a central area, at which point overpopulation will result in the establishment of equilibrium and/or the degradation of the environment. It is expected that a large group will spin-off or splinter off into smaller groups that will be forced to spread out or else migrate out to the periphery of the home range or even beyond. Population growth is perhaps the simplest and most logical mechanism by which to explain, for instance, patterns of imperialism and organized aggression on outgroups. Such aggression can sustain higher rates of growth than under normal circumstances lacking aggression, although this sustained yield may tax the local environment more severely than if the population growth factors had just achieved and stabilized at some level of adaptive equilibrium. I believe both patterns are observable in the archaeological records, as well as mixed or intermittent types of patterns. I would suggest the chronically high rates of crime in contemporary developed society reflects the asymmetries of resource distribution in class-stratified societies, and this harkens back to the earliest days when

Home Ranges and Migration Patterns

All human groups typically have had a home range. This home range was the normal, total territorial of seasonal and perennial habitation and exploitation by a given group of people. Home ranges were circumscribed by several interacting variables. Usually, there would be competitive pressure for resources which were attached to occupation of a particular area during a particular time of the year.

So prevalent have home ranges been throughout human prehistory that it is hard to conceive of any group culture that does not have some established sense of a place on the ground, unless that group has been displaced and is forced to leave its home range to find a new one.

Migratory individuals and groups were frequently "on the move" in human prehistory, displaced by a number of possible factors that would lead a group of people to choose to abandon a particular area and risk the dangers of long-distance travel over unknown territory in order to find a new area for themselves. It is the kind of motivating factors, I believe, that force people to take the desperate decision of leaping out of tall buildings that are on fire--if the prospect of death is imminent by remaining in an area, then people will generally flee and seek to escape such a calamity.

Ecological studies of patterns of migration and territoriality reveal that some individuals are more inclined to move than others, and this pattern may be sexually biased. There is inherent risk to migration and the general pattern is to move to the first open niche and to remain there. Dispersal of population is a natural response to stress, but may also in some circumstances be the result of density-dependent relations leading to the spin off of excess population. This kind of pattern would be associated with adaptive radiation of human groups as well as with niche-expansion and diversification. A distinction for instance has been made between presaturation dispersal of healthy individuals during growth phases, and saturation dispersal based upon density dependent factors. This kind of calculus relates to theories of optimal foraging strategies, and the tradeoffs to movements to unknown areas that increase risk and uncertainty. The decision whether to leave one zone that has been degraded for a better but unknown zone is due primarily to the trade-off in costs remaining versus perceived risks in leaving. If people are starving in the homeland, or they themselves are being hunted into extinction by their cannibalistic neighbors, then there is little choice but to seek new territory.

Dispersal also requires habitat or environmental sinks, either marginal or open habitats, that permit animals to survive for at least a period of time. Sink habitats may actually support temporarily larger populations than source habitats that are more optimal for long-term survival. Risks and mortality tends to be higher in sink habitats, and source to sink movements tend to be irreversible.

Territorial competition, whether inter-cultural or intra-cultural, may result in the rise of a floating population that is not fixed to any particular area, but remains as a satellite population around a central or host region. There would always be pressure from this group, and a tendency to fill up any available spaces within the region that would become open. Floating population would be the most likely to migrate, and also the most susceptible to environmental fluctuations.

If intraspecific competition is high, which I suspect it has been for most of human prehistory due to the tendency for successful adaptations to lead to habitat saturation, then the principle of competitive exclusion operating between different cultural groupings would entail that mutual coexistence of groups within common home ranges was probably not tolerated, although there may have occurred important exceptions to this rule. Because most human populations put multi-factorial demands on their habitats and are niche generalists, it would seem likely that groups could not tolerate the invasion of outside individuals or groups into their territory. Human groups would in theory seek optimal territorial habitats that offered the best range of resources. Such optimum ranges would be complex and difficult to determine analytically, but it would be expected that groups would know it when they found it. It makes sense, as is the case even in modern systems, that in a fundamentally competitive environment, those people smart enough to work out coalitional strategies with potential competitors achieve an advantage of numbers over other out-groups. This would have provided a basis for regional integration and cooperation of different groupings within a larger network system.

The concept of a home range is important archaeologically. We can delineate a geographic region, for instance, that is incorporated by a city-state, for example, as the home range for that political entity. Such a city-state may in fact incorporate a number of smaller sub-units of group and individual home ranges within its sphere. It may incorporate a number of satellite villages and even outlying farmsteads and frontier regions or forests. We may see therefore that home ranges as socially or politically defined territories, may become in time stratified and variegated in a number of significant dimensions.

Eco-Evolutionary Frameworks

Because archaeology is constrained in its construction of reality to the material and depositional nature of its primary object of study, and because human material culture reflect systems that are primarily technological and the products of human work and industry, regardless of what symbolic or ideological purposes these things may be used for, it stands to reason then that archaeology is first a study about past human adaptations, and the cultural differentials of these patterns to both social and natural environments. We can only vaguely guess the reasons why the Easter Islanders carved the giant stone Moas and transported them long-distance to erect them on another part of the Island. We find evidence of religion, lineage organization, even possibly caste-like stratification. But what we can most directly study about these giant stone artifacts of a bygone cultural patterning are their material and physical significance (where they were made, how old they may be, their size, weight, etc.) and the ecological aspects of their construction and their consequences upon the larger island as an ecological system. We can speculate on the kind of social organization that would have made their carving, transportation, erection and subsequent worship or symbolic use possible, and how this might be related to religion, competition for scarce resources, stratification, etc.

I have proposed understanding archaeological systems theory primarily from the standpoint of the eco-evolutionary implications of human material culture in adaptation to, selection of, and transformation of natural environmental settings in which these systems occurred. Adaptation in a human social environment became an increasing important aspect of this development. The primary purpose and origin of human culture was to mediate and facilitate human ecological adaptation, thus cultural systems must be construed as primarily ecological systems that permit and promote human survival and reproductive effort. Very early proto-hominid adaptive regimes and trends established by human populations that were organized into rudimentary cultural systems eventuated both in cultural selection and evolutionary development of the biological foundations of culture, and in cultural development itself.

An eco-evolutionary model is one that I have based upon the study of biological systems theory. That human populations, especially in an aboriginal state, tend to exhibit similar characteristics of other kinds of animal populations because in part they share similar eco-trophic niche profiles. Implications of social organization, patterning and process can often be interpreted in terms of the ecological correlates and models derived from the description of other animal or plant systems.

Eco-evolutionary systems theory has attempted to combine evolutionary theory with ecological models and system theory into a general synthesis. It can be said that all biological systems had ecological implications and a biotic framework within which evolutionary processes were played out. Evolution in turn worked to alter and modify the ecological surroundings that affected the adaptation of varying populations, and hence there was dynamic feedback between any kind of living system and its biotic surroundings. Human systems are best understood in these terms, except that cultural patterns become increasingly a central mediator in these biotic relationships, even to the point that it has in time come to alter the direction of evolutionary development on earth. Many of the patterns and ecological principles that occur in other animal populations, apply in a modified sense to human populations as well, and some of these patterns and processes have even carried over into the development of cultural systems that can be considered otherwise independent of biological determinants.

An eco-evolutionary and eco-cultural model of human systems theory is fundamentally different from a socio-biological or "bio-cultural" mode, nor is its application to archaeological systems theory the same as the use of the evolutionary models in archaeology. The emphasis of an eco-evolutionary approach is upon the study of human ecology, both in its biological and cultural dimensions, while the emphasis in biocultural or sociobiological approaches is more directly on the evolutionary implications of such systems. The ecological relationship to evolutionary processes is explicated more clearly, such that the direct application of evolutionary models and theory to cultural explanation is largely avoided or deemed unnecessary. The way that evolution therefore plays into the understanding of cultural systems is fundamentally different than how this relationship is understood in sociobiological terms, and thus in eco-evolutionary frameworks the position and evolutionary significance of culture is treated more realistically and less ideologically that it is with sociobiological theories that jump directly into genetic explanations of cultural patterning. In fact, in eco-evolutionary models, cultural selection processes that are directly independent of any evolutionary determinism, come to play a critical role influencing the patterning of natural selection and evolutionary development on earth. Human ecology has lead to a reshaping of the natural ecology of the earth. We have through processes of domestication altered and transformed many different species of plants and animals, and even microbes, for our own purposes, and we have thus created entirely new ecological systems with a scale and kind of eco-cultural diversity that is not found in natural systems. To a great extent, human eco-cultural processes have been disruptive and destructive of natural patterns and systems, but not entirely so. At the same time, many natural systems have been displaced and supplanted by eco-cultural systems.

The relationship of eco-evolutionary and eco-cultural theory to theories of cultural ecology and ecological anthropology is critical to the understanding of how these theories coalesce to paint a larger and more accurate picture of human systems. Cultural ecology tended to see cultural modes of adaptation to different environmental settings as shaped by cultural patterns and social structures that we considered to some extent independent of the environment in which they were situated. Ecological anthropology interpreted cultural systems as being founded upon ecological principles, and serving in some direct manner an ecological function beyond the problem of adaptation and production. Culture in such models took on ecological dimensions of understanding, such that even symbolic systems were seen to ultimately be explained in terms of their ecological function.

Eco-cultural theory combines these perspectives with a functionalist model of human systems that is framed within an eco-evolutionary framework. Human cultural systems developed and arose in the first place within an eco-evolutionary context in which human survival and reproductive success were the principle constraining determinants of such systems. Many basic social and cultural patterns apparent in human systems today, far removed from their original precursors, were fundamentally defined on a template of patterning that was evolved millions of years previously. Much of the subsequent elaboration of such systems, their convolution and modification, must be seen as derivative from these basic patterns and the structural order they represented. It is possible to define, for example, the competition for resources with social systems as similar in structure to the intraspecific and interspecific competition for resources in a natural framework, and often leading to very similar consequences.

It is my contention that such similarity is more than just metaphorical analogy occurring at different levels of systems integration. Many social patterns and processes that are basic and fundamental to human systems are homologically related to similar kinds of ecologically defined patterns in the natural order of life. They arose from the same origins, for the same reasons, and ultimately serve the same basic sets of purposes, which in the final analysis is reproductive survival. If, along the way, human systems become culturally shaped and elaborated in interesting ways in which their adaptive significance is not evident or obvious, this is because cultural systems can be said to have taken on secondary characteristics and functions that are derivative of, but undetermined by, adaptive considerations.

The interesting aspect about human cultural patterning and its adaptive functioning is that it has permitted humankind to adapt to and exploit a wide variety of eco-trophic niches and to adaptively generalize and expand its eco-trophic niche in a manner unparalleled by any other known biological species. The development of human social organization has been founded upon the capacity to exploit and appropriate, and in time to domesticate and culturally select for a range of niches that permit human populations to achieve adaptive stability and growth over time, or what might be called functional eco-cultural equilibrium.

Agricultural and horticultural development is evidence of this. Models look at a critical "neolithic" shift from a primary dependence upon the opportunistic exploitation of food resources and the controlled or managed production of food resources that were therefore more dependable and permitted an elevation of eco-cultural equilibrium and increasing diversification of social adaptation and organization. Systems theory as this extends to eco-cultural models also entails that certain associated patterns will emerge at the same time as the emergence of agriculture. We can expect some incipient form of social stratification, for instance, that will articulate around the control and differential access to resources. We expect as well the rise of a rich symbolic culture around a religion that shifts increasingly from an animistic and shamanistic orientation toward a priesthood and a monolithic orthodoxy in which spirit forces acquire distinctive social identities and social roles, and the religion itself acquires a template of social organization. The role of religion at this point is not so much the regulation of the relationship between humans and nature, though this will remain, as much as it becomes a matter of the regulation of the relationships between people, and between the person and the social system as a whole. At this stage of development, we can say that the earlier and more basic or primitive patterns of eco-cultural adaptation become embedded and to some extent buried beneath the emergent complexes that over lay it. It also entails that these basic relationships become ordered and regulated in some less random and more rigid manner than if such systems existed without any further elaboration or social symbolic overlay.

In this case, it is clear that the rise of secondary institutional forms of social functioning and symbolic legitimization derives from and is the consequence of the capacity to more directly harness and control the ecologically based adaptive strategies by means of domestication, development of primary technology, and social organization for work or production, as well as social organization for reproduction. It is typically in largely agrarian contexts that the highest rates of birth are to be found, as well as the highest population densities, excepting some unusually high densities in central urban centers.

The florescence of the cave art cultures in France and Spain are indicative of the early importance of symbolic expression and institutions in cultural life, and the fundamental eco-cultural function that is played by the symbolic organization of experience upon which cultural patterning is based. This rich civilizational complex preceded all known forms of agriculture, and probably most known forms of domestication. Its development required a fundamental knowledge of iron and other pigments and the ability to use these to make paint. The capacity to represent animals in a highly naturalistic and realistic form, from memory, by the light of small oil lamps, and possibly entailing the construction of some kind of scaffolding in order to reach ceilings and high walls, entails a sophistication of both mind and culture that is equal to the modern equivalent in its basic form.

At the same time, cultural patterning has been a feedback mechanism to its natural surroundings such that it has permitted the reshaping of these natural surroundings in both ecological and evolutionary terms. It has also led to a general and chronic situation for human systems, in that intraspecific competition has come to weigh more heavily as a determinant of such systems than interspecific competition has been. As long as human populations were kept within check in natural environments in terms of interspecific competition and human vulnerability to natural selection, then these populations were susceptible to and governed by natural forces and processes. Cultural adaptation gave human groups the leverage and means to escape this natural imperative, and to prevent or interfere with processes of natural selection by substituting processes of cultural selection in their place.

From the standpoint of archaeological systems, the problems and understanding of human adaptation are primarily functional or functionalist problems. Functional problems are systems models, and have structuralist implications that reflect the regular articulation of rules and principles governing the behavior and relationships of complex systems. The functionalist models that are suitable to the development of archaeological systems theory are therefore those that are primarily concerned with human social organization for ecological adaptation and the achievement or adjustment of eco-cultural equilibrium within some kind of environmental framework. The shape of the environmental framework overall will to some extent constrain the resulting shape of the pattern of eco-cultural equilibrium that is achieved by a particular group of people. It sets the standard limits as to what may be achieved and defines the constraints built into the environment that cannot be overcome except perhaps by means of the innovation or invention of new technologies or functional cultural forms.

We can say safely that throughout most of human history, human identity was defined primarily and predominantly by its relationship to the group, and that group identity has always been the major constraining factor governing social processes and patterns. This is true because early proto-cultural adaptations probably permitted humans to coalesce into fairly large social formations, at least as a function of average densities over time and place. Secondly, it has always probably been an imperative for humans that survival of the individual depended mostly if not entirely upon that individual's connection to one group or another. In a general and loose sense, we can state that all animals are fundamentally social in that they depend upon heterosexual reproduction and must maintain socially interactive populations in order to achieve this. But it becomes another issue altogether if we want to differentiate groups in terms of "how" social they may be in some relative sense compared to other alternative groups. We find for instance Orangutans to be fairly a-social creatures for a greater part of their lives. On the other hand, both Chimpanzees and Gorillas usually form small bands often centered around one alpha male and a host of subordinates, but neither primate appears as social as the Baboon who may amass in troops of a hundred or more individuals. I believe human beings evolved fairly early on in groups reflecting sizes that are found today in Gorilla and Chimpanzee groups.

In such social contexts, individual survival and reproductive success depended upon its attachment and positioning with the group. The group afforded a screen of protection for the individual that the individual otherwise would not have had. At the same time, I believe such groups can be defined by their sense of cooperative effort, especially when it comes to the challenges and logistics of social nurturance of the young and prolonged post-partum infant dependency. The group context therefore provided the framework for the early imprinting and socialization of the infant. That these early groupings were family structures that were based upon the principle of descent or lineage probably goes without saying. But lineage and family connection may not have been as formally defined as they subsequently became in neolithic periods, during which traditional family structures remained important. I suspect that the earliest groups were defined by female-centered descent groups, with associated bands of brothers, cousins or alternative fictive brothers who worked and hunted and made war in mostly a cooperative manner. That democracy has been a rare bird in human history, and that authoritarianism the norm, suggests that the model of Homo hierarchicus is probably the most representative, and that humans have always had a social pecking order with one male or a single tight coalition of males playing king of the mountain.

Many of the competition models that are used in ecology theory can be found to be applicable in modified form to human social systems and group theory. Unlike rutting caribou, it is clear that in human competition, the occurrence of coalitional structures and of interference competition between subgroups, or between a single subgroup and the subordinate members who are fundamentally atomized and hence marginalized.

Feeding & Breeding and the Eco-Evolutionary Imperative

Human populations, like any other animal populations, follow key biological imperatives that are related to their evolutionary survival. These are the imperatives of adaptive adjustment to an environment, to maintain energy and metabolic needs, and for reproduction of the species. These requirements can be generally expressed in terms of two general sets of strategies adopted by human populations, the strategies of feeding and breeding.

The key principles underlying eco-cultural systems can be said to be the functions of feeding and breeding, which relate basic patterns of adaptation to meeting the fundamental challenges of biological survival of a population--namely growth, health and physical survival, and biological reproduction. These issues are at least tacitly understood to be true in most if not all models of archaeological systems, but rarely are they made explicit or central to the explanation of the model or system in itself.

It is precisely these sets of critical resources that all groups must organize themselves to serve and achieve. How they do so depends in part upon the environment that they inhabit or mark out as part of their range, and in part upon the arbitrary cultural factors that may be associated with any particular group. Feeding patterns entail eco-culturally the establishment and maintenance of food-getting strategies that connect with the natural environment in a manner that, ideally, would exhibit long-term stability and minimal random fluctuation. Humans have been found to be capable of exploiting a very broad range of food resources in the natural environment, and they have actually added many derivative or secondary food resources. It is evident that the main line of hominids at least always had the requirement of good protein sources, which required that they were to some extent predatory. These protein resources were supplemented with crude sources of fat, carbohydrate and vegetables and plant food from which they derived secondary forms of nutrition such as vitamins, sugars, oils and fats.

Successful food-getting strategies would have resulted in successful breeding or reproductive strategies, and much that is fundamentally eco-cultural about humankind centers around the formation of social groupings serving the purposes of biological reproduction.

Sexual reproduction requires other kinds of social strategies involving mate availability and choice. Often, the requirements of feeding and breeding are partitioned seasonally and geographically in animal populations. What is seen in human beings are several sets of interrelated facets--females are sexually receptive year round, which means probably that the problems of breeding and feeding were not partitioned in any simple manner. There appears as well to have been a sexual selection for physical traits that promote or enhance human sexuality. The other set of traits associated with human reproductivity is the prolonged period of post-natal dependency and deceleration of the growth curve of humans. It is evident therefore that breeding and reproduction was a year-long preoccupation of mature females.

I suspect that the fundamental division of labor in primitive human society was not so much hunting and gathering, as it was between feeding and breeding. We may now only speculate on the kind of social organization that would permit this pattern to take hold and evolve into human society as we know this today. I suspect that even in early human populations, there would be a premium placed on prized protein packages and resources that would best supplement and promote human reproductive growth and development.

I suspect furthermore that high rates of infant mortality would have prompted similarly high rates of conception and impregnation. If such a view of the early hominid world is not a "liberated" one from a feminists point of view, I doubt the idea of feminism, or even of equality, existed at this time--it would not have had any immediate survival value.

I claim that protein resources were always a critical limiting factor in human populations because humans cannot make all their amino acids, nor can all amino acids be derived from plant resources. Critical to human growth and long-term health would be the availability of essential amino acids that could only be obtained from quality sources of protein, especially from other animals, fish, and, if these fail, other human beings.

Hunting strategies in such a case would have been predatory on certain kinds of game and opportunistic on a wide variety of food resources. We may for instance distinguish patterns of Type I, II and III Response by predators, and it seems to me that human populations would have followed all three types of response depending upon the environmental variables concerned. Especially evident would be a type three response or compensatory response of facultative predation that would permit humans to conveniently switch to alternative prey when predation on a preferred species leads to stress upon that species. The notion of search image that is associated with a type III predatory response pattern is associated I believe quite clearly with the development of symbolic pattern recognition processes in early humans. Naturalistic animal forms are among the easiest and most universally generalized images recognized by human beings. Stimuli of early recognition are the lack of symmetry of an animal form when seen from a lateral view, and the prototypical shapes of animal forms (four legs, tail, head, etc.).

…A search image is a perceptual change in the ability of a predator to detect a familiar cryptic prey. Once the predator has secured a palatable item of prey, the predator finds it progressively easier to find others of the same kind. The more adept the predator becomes at securing a particular prey item, the longer and more intensely it concentrates on the item. In time the numbers of the prey species become so reduced or its population so dispersed that encounters between it and the predator lessen. The search image for that species begins to wane, and the predator begins to react to another species. The combination of increasing density of prey and establishment of a search image results in a sudden increase of the perceived prey species in the predator's diet, giving a sigmoidal functional response curve.

Studies have shown that predators can acquire a search image from remarkably few experiences… In losing an image the predator may simply not respond to the perceived stimulus or may in fact no longer perceive it--that is, no longer distinguish the properties of the prey from the background. The search image is maintained by rewards in the form of the acquisition of food. When rewards are no longer there, the bird turns to another image. In effect, the predator response to changes in rewards. The extinction of an image tends to occur more slowly than its acquisition, and among some predators the search image may be retained for some time, even in the absence of rewards….(Smith & Smith, 2001: 274-5)

The general thrust of this argument depicts our proto-humans as generalized predators for which selection favored the capacity to develop, maintain and retain an increasing number of search images as well as probably mapping and other pattern recognition processes, that allowed human groups to exploit a broad range of resources in the environment, or what can be called niche-generalization. It is expected that humans, lacking the natural traits of top predators, substituted phenotypically acquired cultural traits that permitted predation at trophic levels otherwise not within their grasp. Numerical response would have been a typical secondary patterning of human predation. Primary numerical response or aggregative response would be an increase in the number of humans swamping their prey populations. Secondary or long-term numerical response would lead to patterns of migration fluctuating with changing prey densities. This entails that human home ranges would have had to have expanded and consisted of a fairly large area, which also entails a kind of extensification (versus intensification) that led to a low ratio of people per unit area of land as well as to local overpopulation of resource rich regions and also low efficiency of resource utilization per area occupied. The second pattern of numerical response would have been fluctuating rates of predator natality and mortality in response to changing prey densities.

Type III response patterns also lead to differential foraging strategies that relate to the efficiency of energy expenditure in the hunting of prey. We may identify both optimal and risk-sensitive foraging strategies as applicable to human predatory responses. We may identify as well satisficing strategies and the marginal value theorem which states that a population will depend upon a specific resource only as long as that resource provides profitable returns. This relates back to the basis of Type III predatory response that is based upon the threshold of security, in which a particular kind of prey will be selected only as long as it yields profitable returns.

Human cultural systems evolved therefore to function at a relatively high energy state, which meant active defence from threat of predation, seconded by flight, and the active pursuit of prey, seconded by attempting to trap prey. Within an ecosystemic model, humans achieved success to the extent that they came to occupy higher rungs of an eco-trophic niche pyramid in any system that they happened to occupy. Ranges of predatory human populations would have been relatively large, requiring "continental" proportions to effectively maintain large populations. At the same time, human population densities would have increased, creating an odd situation. The local environments humans inhabited would have been fundamentally stressed.

In this human social organization evolved in a manner unlike any other animal group known. The closest correlate was probably Chimpanzee groups, but even this may not clearly represent early human social formations. Human populations must have been both mobile and yet capable of sustaining large local densities. A transhumant pattern over a home range within a larger effective territory would have been necessary.

Every group of people who ever existed on earth were fundamentally challenged by their general environmental situation to achieve some kind of effective eco-cultural pattern of response. It is true that most groups simply inherit a system as part of a larger tradition, but still there is a need always to adapt that system to the ever changing contexts. Even if environmental factors were not continuously varying, it is likely that from year to year and from generation to generation people would seek to alter their eco-cultural system with the aim of either improving their relationship to the environment or altering their environment. Endogenous change is an essential aspect of all cultural systems, and we call this form of change "drift" when it seems to have no directional orientation or larger sense of purpose.

We can say that Roman culture of the 7^th Century B. C. was not Roman culture of the time of Jesus, nor was it Roman culture in an exact sense a century later. Roman culture is a good example, for it was so long-lived, but it was simply not the same thing at the end of its time as the beginning. Neither can we look at the Italian people of Rome today and find much trace of a distinctively Roman culture. I think the Chinese of central China exhibit in many fundamental ways a basic continuity of culture that may extend back in time several thousand years, but this is due perhaps to an inherent sino-centrism and xenophobia of the Chinese, as well as the fact that China seems to be capable of universal incorporation of foreign cultural elements without dramatically altering its internal profile or sense of order. By far, the greatest changes ever to have happened to mainland Chinese culture has been in the past half Century of communist rule, but even here communism appears to have been molded to fit a traditional framework of the culture, where values of filial piety feed into symbolic loyalty for the state. Just the same, if one were to meet the Shang Chinese of the earliest Bronze age periods, one would find fundamental differences of culture with the Chin Chinese who built the Great Wall, or the later Han Chinese. Surely, if one goes to central China today, one is dealing with the direct ancestors of the peasants and officials of these early states, and many of the same cultural forms and basic institutions have survived virtually unaltered, and yet there would still be a sense of difference between modern and ancient Chinese.

It is obvious to myself, if to no one else, that the Roman and Chinese systems represented large scale civilizational complexes that were long lasting, capable of universal incorporation, and had maintained a sense of complex equilibrium in their regional settings. Similarly we can point to the Hindu system of the Indian subcontinent. I believe that the Egyptian system is similar as well, though it was overlaid with a Moslem veil. In the Arthurian legends of the Mabinogion, we find the glimmerings of a feudal system at the brink of a Dark Age, with the promise of a civilizational complex to come. The consequential British empire suggests the fluorescence of a complex and variegated cultural pattern that was the end-product of this early prehistory. None of these complexes were achieved overnight--all went through multiple phases of growth and developmental change. All experienced numerous set-backs that, if things had gone just a little differently on this battlefield or that, would have resulted in possibly a whole different trajectory being taken. Surely, none of these civilizations was achieved without a great deal of bloodshed and some form of involuntary servitude.

I harp on the great historical civilizations only to demonstrate how transculturation can occur over time and space, how internal endogenous change and drift are a part of any system, how acculturation can affect a people in a reciprocal manner, and how the end products of these historical trajectories will be fundamentally different from the people who started the system off in the first place. These same principles would hold for small cultural and civilizational complexes as much as they held for the Great Empires. Undoubtedly many minor civilizational complexes have arisen and fallen only to remain forgotten and buried in some remote region. It is expected that the dominant cultural orientation in an area will be the preferred mode of expression, but this dominant orientation will also tend to be affected by the introduction of elements of the subordinate cultural orientations that it incorporates. If one crosses cultural boundaries to live and work in a foreign society, it is implicit to the situation that one will have to adopt and adapt to one's hosts cultural values and orientation, and not the other way around.

Human beings have been interacting with their environments in a similar eco-cultural manner almost from the beginning, if we could exactly draw a point in time when we could say that such and such represented the birth of human culture. Rather, human cultural patterning was not achieved all at once, but gradually arose over time and took shape as it arose to incorporate more and greater numbers of different elements. The human cultural landscape of 100,000 BP looked much different than it did at 1,000,000 B. P. or at 1000 BP If we took time slices every 100,000 years for the past two or three million years, at each slice we would find a fundamentally different pattern operating, and yet still we would see some continuity and preservation of earlier patterns. We would end up with twenty or thirty different slices, arranged in sequential order, but each varying considerable than any of the others. We could not say that the 100,000 BP time slice was more like the one million time slice than the one thousand B. P. slice. Surely, variation appears to have increased with time, and this increase appears to have followed a log-linear kind of curve. More changes and pattern variation probably occurred in the last 100,000 years than in the previous 1,000,000 years before that time, and hence we might conclude that 100,000 would be more like its previous periods than its subsequent periods.

What I believe one would find operating within the most of the time slices up until the last one would have been a fundamentally very similar kind of rudimentary, prototypical cultural patterning that was based upon crude lithic technologies. Language systems would have varied almost familially or within more extended lineage systems, and these themselves would have been very basic and almost iconographic in communicative function and capacity. Common language would have been worked out around shared hearths, and would have created a sense of tradition about the hearth that would bear witness to the succession of one generation after another with no great or dramatic cultural variation or change. In such a broader context, the fate of one cultural system over the other would have been more or less the same, as all would have had almost equally likely odds of failing out. It would have been like a paleolithic dark ages that may even have had semi-feudal organizational structures across a vast and variegated landscape. Of course, the structure of such a society would probably have been small bands based upon big-man politics between competing groups. We could not say that such groups were preferably patrilineal or matrilineal or some intermediate form. Hawaiian structures based upon a bilateral system seem to me to have been the most adaptively flexible structures suitable for such contexts. No single cultural system could achieve such superiority of numbers or conditions that it would be capable of effecting a long lasting civilizational complex. All groups, being more or less equal to one another in terms of size and technology and structural patterning and ecological capacity for adaptation, would have therefore been in this overarching kind of scramble competition for resources. I would not know what a reasonable estimate for a populational or social unit of early hominids may have been. Generally, they are stereotypically depicted at most in groups of tens--some have been wise enough to endow Neanderthal societies with structures that might have gone into the hundreds. It is impossible to say really what a long-term moving average would have been, but apparently this moving average probably increased gradually and then more rapidly in a logarithmic manner as a function of time as well.

Without a doubt, as is evident with more recent civilizations, certain groups sought out and seized the advantage of occupying strategic areas and core ecological zones that offered a greater abundance of resources. Long term occupation of such regions would have led to a population doubling that would have maxed out within three or five generations, even if very high infant mortality rates could have been presumed to occur. Thus, within any given area where there is annual or seasonal abundance, population growth would have to achieve some sense of equilibrium at a stable level. This would entail that some system of internalized warfare, sacrifice, or periodic expulsion of groups would have served to maintain population levels in check. Alternatively, as suggested by the New Guinea highland evidence, which appears to have supported fairly high densities of primitive populations for prolonged periods of time, such mechanisms as post-partum sexual taboos and lengthened intervals between births would have had the effect of tapering population growth to manageable levels.

If we took our 100,000 year time slices, and broke this down to 1,000 year sub-slices, we would end up with a sequence of 100 units each of which may have spanned between 40 and 60 or 70 generations. If we consider even infant mortality rates at 60 or 70 percent, we would still get a small group rapidly filling its environmental niches within just a few generations of time, within a one to two hundred year period at most. A thousand year interval is much more than adequate to witness the rise and fall of numerous small groupings, and the succession of five to ten such climax periods. If we get down to the 100 year interval scale, and we sliced up the last 4,000,000 years accordingly, we would basically end up with 40,000 such slices to have to deal with. The amount of transition from first to last slice would have been tremendous, as well as the amount of oscillation of pattern between. Such a 100 year interval scale is just long enough for human populations to lose a sense of living memory and experience from beginning to end, and for the noetic function of culture in preserving oral knowledge to become important. By modern standards, if we get a community size much over 1000 people, it becomes very difficult for all people to know everyone else on a first name basis. Above that limit, probably different kinds of social control mechanisms would have to operate to keep everyone within the same playing field. In this regard, we must also ask what size a group needs to be to be relatively viable from an evolutionary perspective. A group of ten runs the risk of total disaster almost on a daily basis. Such a group might have only one or two key individuals upon whom the rest would depend, and these may die at any time, leaving the group without a central focus. A group size of a hundred or a thousand appears to me to be a better unit to deal with--even for purposes of breeding, consideration of reproductive viability, mate choice and availability, would demand numbers that reach into the thousands if not tens of thousands. A group size that hovered at around a hundred at the edge of a peripheral region, back of beyond so to speak, would become within a century or two thoroughly inbred, and long term inbreeding would probably prove quite detrimental to the group. It is obvious therefore that even very early groups established larger scale, regional systems based upon regular exchange and interaction. They had to do so for the sake of their survival and continuance.

One aspect of human society and human nature is, I believe, our tremendous social capacity that is culturally induced and not instinctually determined. We have a built-in need for social relationships, but this need is not rooted in heredity rather than in the lack of hereditary constraints that determine that we should always run in large herds. We are not herd animals at all. We resemble more pack animals, but our cultural plasticity and our social dependency entails that we can become, under the right conditions, herd forming animals. In other words, pack size can increase considerably under the right conditions. Under other conducive conditions, atomization can set in almost to the point that it becomes each individual for themselves and all social order and organization becomes lost. It also entails that if we have strong social tendencies, we also have basic anti-social tendencies as well. If one looks at the majority of murder cases in civil contexts today, one would find that they are related either to jealousy and spousal-sexual abuse and relations, or else to competition over or control of money. The regulation of our social behavior is culturally overdetermined, and genetically underdetermined.

Under the right conditions, it can be expected that groups can coalesce and grow within a century or two to the limits of their range, without attempting to expand this range, and will establish a longer term system in equilibrium that would last possibly for a millennia, and in isolation, possibly as much as 10,000 years. Eventually, each system would break down due to a number of different factors--acculturation, drift of elements from the center, environmental degradation, climate variability, or natural disaster. Epidemic disease as a widespread disruptive agency terminating a long term cultural sequence or complex should not be discounted as a potentially important factor. There is not reason not to expect that this was as true in a basic sense for early Homo erectus populations as it was apparently true for indigenous populations of the proto-historical contact period. Populations would have waxed and waned in a regular tempo, and the cultural complexes associated with these populations would have risen and fallen as well. There is no reason, under the right conditions, not to assume that Homo erectus populations might have coalesced into regional complexes numbering in the thousands or even tens of thousands in areas featuring rich ecological resources and diversity of niches. Just the same, these early hominid social formations would probably have been fundamentally unstable and would have been only seasonally regulated, with seasonal concentration and dispersal occurring. They would have been unstable because, I believe, heavy hunter-gather and forager formations on a landscape, even in rich resource zones, would rapidly take a heavy toll upon these resources. It would be like putting too many lions on a herd of zebras--the herd of zebras would diminish, and the lions would be left eating buzzards or their own carcasses. Cyclical crashes of great herds, and related oscillations of climate and other ecological cycles, would entail that long term hominid social formations would have been difficult to sustain to the point that the population could reach larger sizes and achieve an eco-cultural equilibrium.

Bio-Cybernetics--The Function of Communication in Social Ecology

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:

Level 1

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.

Level II

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.

Human Social Ecology in a Biological Framework

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.

Symbolic & Geographical Ecology

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.

First, Second & Third-Order Human Systems

Efficiency and Entropy within an Eco-evolutionary Context

Efficiency in ecological and evolutionary frameworks are relative to the system and the surroundings being described. A mechanical definition of efficiency is a relatively high ratio of output to input in a working system. An maximally efficient system accomplishes a set of effects (an end state) with the minimum of waste or effort. We can contrapose efficiency of a working system to the complementary state of entropy we can assign to  a system, which for a closed thermodynamic system becomes the measure of the amount of total energy unavailable for work, or the relative measure of disorder or randomness in a system (in any given state). All naturally occurring systems, including human systems, must obey the laws of thermodynamics, which means that we can have no perfectly efficient or perfectly non-entropic system.

Work is defined as the informational (nonrandom) organization of energy to achieve some desired effect or product or to maintain some systemic state of order within a given amount of time. Work in its most fundamental sense can be defined as the systematic transfer of energy from one form or state to another, or state transformation. Work induces a kind of change therefore, and results a form of change. This form of change is the opposite of natural entropic tendencies towards increasing randomization. I will therefore call "positive change" any state transformation that results in an increasingly non-entropic state, and a negative change as any state transformation resulting in an increasingly entropic state.

All naturally occurring systems change.

No system that exists cannot change--there are no static systems.

There are no perfectly entropic or random states in reality.

There are no perfectly ordered or non-random states in reality.

All systems are changing either towards increasing order or increasing disorder.

All other things being equal, all systems will tend towards increasing disorder if no work is done to increase order.

Since work is always be definition imperfect, and because all systems tend in the long run toawards increasing disorder, all working systems must eventually become dysfunctional as systems.

Naturally occuring systems can therefore be called informationally stochastic or "self-organizing" systems because there occurs no well-defined, external causal agency that determines the organizational structure of the patterning of a system.

An organized system is one that is intelligently ordered, or "informationally coherent," to perform some minimal form of work. Intelligent ordering of any system is a measure of that system's integration and relative state complexity.

1. All systems are part of a larger, more entropic environment that constitute the surroundings of a system.

2. All systems are thermodynamically open to their surrounding environment.

3. All systems are composed of multiple components and thus are multi-factorially determined.

4. The determination of any system, according to the laws of thermodynamics and of informational dynamics, is always incomplete--systems are thus complexly underdetermined.

5. Systems are therefore subject to continuous state change that is both exogenous and exogenous.

6. The complex underdetermination of partially open thermodynamic systems entails that all such systems can perform only a limited amount of work for a given duration of time.

7. Eventually, all naturally occurring systems must disintegrate and cease to function (to do work) as informationally coherent systems.

It is important to distinguish between total entropy of a complex system and the net entropy of such a system.

1. Naturally occurring systems are self-organizational working systems that achieve some sense of complex equilibrium within its environment.

2. Equilibrium is an entropy dependent and temporally dependent relationship of a system, such that the higher the equilibrium of a system, the lower its  total entropy, and the longer lasting the system will be.

3. This equilibrium can be understood in terms of the ratio of net efficiency of the ratio of energy input into a system (E_I) over the energy output from the system (E_O) plus the energy lost from the system, or the instantaneous disorder of the system (S) equals 1.

K = E_O / E_I - S = 1

4. All natural systems will tend towards some optimum value of equilibrium that will be a function of the time and size of the system. Equilibrium of a system is a time dependent function, such that a system will increase in order towards equilibrium, achieve a stable state-path trajectory, and eventually then decrease in order back towards total disequilibrium.

5. The measure of the efficiency of a system is positively correlated with the measure of the integration and informational value of a system.

6. A totally disordered system is a one that exists at the lowest potential energy state and has the least amount of informational value, whereas a hypothetically and totally ordered system is one that exists at the highest potential energy shate and that has the greatest amont of informational value.

Define natural physical systems.

Distinguish these from biological systems and define these.

Distinguish these from human systems and define these.

I will venture a basic set of propositions about biological systems in general and their eco-evolutionary tendencies:

1. Natural biological systems tend to evolve towards higher energy utilization or a higher energy budget but at a cost of greater entropy to the system.

The primary concerns with human systems theory are to explain:

The processes underlying the original and historical development of human systems

The processes underlying the organizational patterning and integration of human systems.

The processes underlying the transformation of human systems from one state into another.

Because human beings are mammals and are social, they represent animal populations. Human populations are therefore subject to the same basic biological imperatives that all biological systems are subject to. These imperatives, defined within an eco-evolutionary framework, are the challenges of adaptive survival and reproductive success. These become expressed in animal populations primarily in terms of three primary biological goals:

1. feeding as a primary measure of environmental adaptation

2. avoiding negative selection, primary by predation or parasitism

3. achieving positive selection by successful breeding

Because within a natural eco-evolutionary framework, no trait-development will be tolerated or successful in the long-term unless it promotes evolutionary success, the rise of human trait-complexes relating to and underlying human cultural systems can only be understood within an eco-evolutionary framework.

All natural systems are governed by basic thermodynamic rules and all biological ecosystems can be understood in terms the energy exchange dynamics that occur in such systems. Early eco-systems models were based upon energy exchange dynamics of foodwebs within ecosystems.

Reliance upon plants is an inherently more energy efficient strategy than reliance on other animals, and leads  to greater biomass.

Larger biomass systems are determined either by greater population densities and/or greater body size per individual.

The rise of human cultural systems can be fit squarely into this eco-evolutionary framework. Human systems, as natural systems, will increase in order, scale and complexity as the result of increased  working efficiency by which it achieves  these basic biological imperatives. This is definable as the use of information (or know-how or "basic science") to improve the efficiency and likelihood of success in all three areas of adaptation.

It follows that the rise of human civilization and the evolutionary development of cultural systems can be understood clearly in terms of the degree to which these goals have been achieved with increasing efficiency through the use of knowledge.

1. early humans relied primarily upon high-energy cost/low efficiency patterns of Type III response and numerical response predation and attack-abatement/defense by which to accomplish biological goals 1 & 2. Predation strategies represented always mixed animal-plant dependent eco-trophic niche profiles that entailed a great deal of local and regional variability of patterning. Hunting and gathering strategies that were primarily opportunistic modes of adaptation that entailed active pursuit and defense and put humans at the top of the eco-trophic niche pyramid in competitive exclusion with other top predators: i.e. large cats. In order to survive, the earliest strategy adopted by human populations were those of niche diversification and niche generalization, requiring high levels of mobility and relatively small and flexible group formations that were most highly responsive to alternating environmental circumstances.

2. subsequent development of cultural patterns were tied to the alteration of food-getting and processing strategies that permitted lower energy costs per returns of food value, increasing security and increasing the potentiality of reproductive growth. Waterways adaptations to lacustrian, lotic and coastal systems were an important intermediate adaptation, as were the pre-pastoral reliance upon great herds of ungulates.

3. This process led eventually to multiple forms of plant and animal domestication, early forms featuring the domestication of horses, possibly reindeer, dogs, pigs, cattle, as well as many different kinds of plants and cereal cultigens like barley, early strains of wheat, rice, yam, taro, sago, bananas & plantains, etc. In this regard, it would be important to ask what pre-domesticated strains and patterns might have been like, such as broad-cast planting and harvesting of wild strains of rice, etc.

We can understand the net energy balance in human eco-systems in terms of the amount of free energy that could be achieved from any particular mixed or heterogeneous strategy that would be adopted by a group of  a certain size. We can assume that in any given context, low energy expenditure would be the preferred pattern over high energy expenditure. We can assume as well that high energy returns would be preferred over low energy returns. We can expect a calculus in foraging strategy that would attempt to optimize gains over costs. The general pattern therefore was the following kind of game theory framework:

It is evident in this model that we can derive correlation coefficients of systems relative to their total inputs and outputs. For any real system to be effective, it would depend upon a positive correlation between low energy expenditures (of human physical effort) and reasonably high energy returns (per unit of human effort). Systems must at least break even in this formula, and will soon go extinct if they fail or achieve a high negative correlation. As a result, humans have learned through information and know-how to substitute the labor or work of other animals to maximize their gains while minimizing their own expenditures. Much of the other "animals" have been other humans, and this formula underlies our history of complex social stratification. Domestication has represented a process of systematically substituting the labor of other animals in the management and procurement of increased resources. Later on, industrialization permitted humans to substitute physical machinery, coupled to natural energy sources, to  drive sophisticated systems of production that tended  to displace human labor. It cannot be said that the efficiency ratios under these alternative developments of second and third order systems were necessarily absolutely efficient per unit energy consumed, but it can be said that these systems tend to provide more stability and  hence food-getting security for human populations, and relative to human labor, they provided net greater return. At the same time, these breakthroughs that permitted greater system stability at the same time provided a platform for dramatically increased population densities to be permanently sustained. It gave rise therefore also to new forms of social organization and new problems and issues that have yet to be solved.

Human population growth would be made possibly only under circumstances where favorable environmental conditions permitted favorable food-getting strategies and minimized negative selection. These would be the preferred locations-systems that humans would have found and they would have invented for themselves means to achieve this preferred pattern of pro-adaptive systems via adoption of various modalities of cultural selection (the use of know-how & information) to achieve either: 1. Higher energy systems; 2. Higher net gains in systems.

There were two general tendencies in human systems:1.  the drive towards adaptation at lower eco-trophic niche levels, which permitted greater net energy returns in terms of total biomass of human systems; 2. the drive towards higher eco-trophic niche levels, which permitted humans to survive as secondary and even tertiary consumers which entailed that humans operated at lower overall biomass.

As long as these tendencies were achieved primarily through patterns of natural selection, the drive towards 1. Usually meant a form of adaptive-niche specialization and probably higher levels of predation. Thus, as long as this was primarily a naturally  mediated processes through genetic character displacement, such groups would have  run a high risk of extinction. 2. The alternate pattern entailed a form of adaptive-niche generalization and diversification, which entailed maximization of populations but at a narrower base near the top. This would have resulted in competitive exclusion of possible interspecific predators, and would have been evolutionarily the preferred pattern of development.

Human cultural systems achieve mostly  a balance between these two tendencies, except in regions that prevent one or the other from occurring, such as in extremely cold or extremely hot and dry climates where plant productivity is comparatively lower.

We must distinguish between natural selection patterns, both positive and negative, as well as, in human systems, what can be called cultural selection patterns that were both positive and negative. Cultural selection factors can only be construed within an eco-evolutionary framework if they result in some form of natural selection pattern. Cultural selection factors therefore represent of form of indirect natural selection. The general trend over time was an increase in cultural selection factors and a decrease in influence of direct negative selection factors. This indirection was mediated within human cultural systems that achieved greater work load and/or greater efficiency and therefore carried heavier informational load and/or greater communicational efficiency.

Social & cultural stratification and the rise of second order systems.

Eco-Cultural Evolution & Dynamic Succession

A model of eco-cultural evolution is developed which claims that for most of human prehistory, a distinctive patterning of cultural development occurred in which small groupings existed in basic ecological competition with one another, either directly or indirectly competing for natural resource domains. Cultural adaptations provided cultural groupings the capacity to overcome and succeed in the basic evolutionary imperatives of reproduction and productive survival. In the long run, cultural groupings that failed to meet these challenges were eventually "selected out" while other groups that succeeded experienced population growth and expansion of the cultural areas, and development of the cultural configuration into a more complex and differentiated system of relations. Thus cultural groupings exhibited in time a unique cultural configuration of traits that served as a reproductive and resource boundary, and thus served as a kind of sub-species grouping. Alternative cultural development thus was analogous to sympatric speciation. The human evolution of cultural groupings was therefore very similar in form and function to the natural evolution of species. Groups that achieved basic cultural innovations and significant breakthroughs in designs and devices of cultural adaptation, achieved greater adaptive success than other groupings. Under appropriate ecological conditions of relative environmental stability and isolation, cultural groupings could achieve a relative level of equilibrium of adaptation that tended, like traditional conservativism, to resist significant changes to the configuration of cultures or to the manner of environmental adaptation. The cultural information, or knowledge, required for a system to achieve adaptive success was transmitted from generation to generation, and was also transmitted horizontally through processes of transculturative interaction. Groups could be absorbed by other groups, and the cultural information of one system can become integrated into the cultural system of another group, albeit in a selective manner. Cultural selection was an important mechanism, parallel to natural selection, that served to intermediate human relationships with the environment, with other social groups and between the members of a group.

The basis for a model of cultural evolution is to explain the rise of human groups or social formations as competing organizations of population across a natural landscape. Early cultural groupings would have become adapted to various trophic niche-profiles or configurations upon a natural landscape, and would possibly have come into competition for one another for basic resources, access to certain zones or ranges of land or eco-diversity, and this competition would have had several different kinds of outcomes that would have subsequently affected the course of human social development. Competition between human groups would have been both direct and indirect, especially when two groups exhibit very similar trophic-niche profiles and occupied the same or overlapping regions. It could have led to warfare patterns, and alternatively to the establishment of certain patterns of trade and reciprocal exchange by which the possibilities of conflict could have been mediated.

In its simplest sense, a model of cultural evolution presumes that human group formations were significant at an early stage of human evolutionary development, that such group formations were corporate and relatively long lasting affairs, and that they achieved early on some sense of cultural integration. The initial presupposition is that early human adaptations were so successful that it led to a rapid saturation of any environments occupied by human populations. New innovations would have possibly opened new niches and ranges of adaptation, and any vacuum that may have occurred upon the prehistoric landscape would have been rapidly filled in by other peoples.

The analogy is to compare different cultural group formations, and their associated and emergent traditions, with the emergence of different species of biological life-forms, all competing or at least interacting with one another for survival. Cultural systems would come into contact and possible cooperation or competition with other systems for what can be defined as scarce and limited natural resources. There would have been enough similarity between different human cultural systems such that anytime they did come into contact, there would have been a sense of competition involved, and the general ecological principle of competitive exclusion would have been the general rule. To a great extent, in regionally saturated frameworks, eco-cultural differentiation into different and to some measure mutually complementary eco-trophic niche profiles, would be expected to have occurred. Niche diversification and expansion would be expected such that there would tend to be the exclusion of marginal groups to marginal zones of adaptation. Groups that could not compete with others would be rapidly replaced or otherwise marginalized from prime habitat. A part of this intergroup competition would have been expressed in terms of patterns of warfare and aggression between groups. Alternatively it would have been expressed in terms of economic variables.

It could be expected that groupings would sort themselves out onto landscapes in such a way as to maximize the distances and spacing between them and to minimize the competitive overlap between two such groupings. If overlap occurred, some form of conflict and resolution would be expected as an eventual outcome. Warfare may have been a basic and chronic part of human existence time immemorial. As a result of such competition, it can be expected that on occasion, some groups would be forced to migrate to new areas, where the chances of success would be even less. Some groups would fail, and other groups would succeed. Groups that failed would either become extinct as effective systems, or else become swamped or absorbed in time by a larger and more successful system. Such patterns would have been especially marked in areas of high ecological diversity and density that would have been capable of sustaining larger numbers of people.

Human intraspecific competition, when carried on upon the group level, would have become something similar in form and outcome to normal interspecific competition between different species. Those cultural groupings who could achieve a degree of adaptive flexibility and group solidarity than other groupings, would tend to have an adaptive advantage over other groupings.

For most of human prehistory, patterns of warfare and political conflict between competing groups would have been of relatively low-intensity affairs that might involve only a handful or at most a hundred or occasionally a thousand combatants at any one time, and probably only a few deaths. Intensity of conflict increases with sedentarism and the rise of population densities and the greater carrying-capacities that secondary cultural adaptations afforded to people. Such warfare would have been regulated to a great extent by ritual and magical institutions that would serve to reduce the risk and the cost of waging warfare. It may have taken the form of raiding for slaves or for religious purposes, such as coming of age fulfillment or a fulfilling the prophecy of a dream quest. The punctuation of ritually regulated warfare, as is ethnographically documented in the New Guinea highlands, by episodes of secularly motivate warfare that will involve a higher degree of bloodletting and violence, would be an expected pattern in any warfare system.

Warfare therefore would have tended to produce optimal spacing arrangements between groups, and would have provided a mechanism by which "safe distances" between peoples could be judged and maintained.

It may be difficult to demonstrate in the archaeological record one way or another whether such warfare patterns ever played part in the distribution and patterning of cultures on the human landscape, but from the standpoint of a systems perspective such a model fits the expected outcomes of cultural development, and is almost demanded by an extension of other models to a regional or interregional framework. There is no reason to think that patterns of human violence and warfare are only the earmarks of modern civilization, and that human nature has not always had a dark sided proclivity towards violent pursuit of self interest at the expense of other people. If this is attributing modern kinds of motivations to lost and ancient peoples, perhaps the table can be turned around, and we can attribute to modern "civilized" human beings what are in fact primitive and very basic motivations that relate to the efficacy of the use of violent force to achieve one's goals.

Some kind of warfare pattern could be expected even in contexts in which the distribution of people upon a landscape was fairly sparse and spread out and eco-trophically differentiated and variegated. In fact, some form of conflict could be expected whenever and where ever the possibility existed for more peaceful exchange and acculturative, or transculturative contact, between different groups of people.

The basis for this argument is that human nature, by virtue of its cultural adaptation, has achieved a state of "world openness" that can be defined by its "unfinished business" in terms of the internal regulatory mechanisms of human behavior. Regulation of human behavior in appropriate response sets and relational configurations with other people depend upon the capacity of cultural acquisition and shared traits or constraints. That these patterns, ultimately adaptation in their functional and evolutionary purpose, are most often far from perfectly fit to their natural circumstances. It follows that cultural regulatory mechanisms, however internalized, occasionally, in fact, quite frequently, break down. The result is not a human animal that is, like any predatory, out for its next meal. Rather it is in reality a kind of animal without any instinctual controls at all, that is run amok or rabid. It is in reality like a human monster that knows no boundaries or limits to its own destructive behavior.

Cultural Mediation, Symbolic Transformation and Human Evolution

The rise of human cultural development and of human systems is centrally tied to the mechanisms involved in cultural mediation of the natural environment, particularly in relation to adaptive capacities and natural selection pressures upon human populations. These were made possible by the adaptive and functional organization of a complex brain around a host of uniquely human or anthropomorphic traits. I have defined this basic organization of brain function to be the basis for human symbolization, and the resulting patterns of cultural mediation of the environment are fundamentally therefore mechanism of symbolic mediation that permit the organization of experience to achieve information and knowledge about the world.

Cultural mediation deals essentially with a primary function of culture in human reality, and that is to mediate the experience of reality upon all levels of our being and our adaptive functioning. Our dependency upon culture, and what can be called our social and symbolic dependency, are the consequence of our evolutionary reliance upon the mediational function of culture in our adaptive response patterning to environmental stimuli and cues. As a consequence of this evolutionary development in human systems, there occurred a continuous course of symbolic transformation of human reality, both externally in the objective material world, and internally in the noetic organization of human consciousness. This transformed the world as it transformed our experience and view of the world, and this transformation was culturally mediated, and to the extent that cultural patterning has been historically, and I would contend, evolutionarily variable, it has led to different consequences for different groups of people in the world.

From this standpoint, simple stone tools were among the first symbolic objects to be made, used and carried by human beings, and they reflected and reinforced a basic change in the relationship that Human beings carried on with their natural environment, for they permitted adaptation and problem solving, the primary function of natural symbolisms, in complex environmental settings. The use of tools and cultural traits invariably facilitated and promoted human survival. As cultural patterns developed, these complexes permitted a niche diversification and the capacity to adapt to a broad range of environmental contexts. As humans succeeded in an evolutionary sense through cultural adaptations, a natural and expected outcome would be the significant increase in human populations and total human biomass represented in the biosphere. Cultural patterning arose in an evolutionary context. It would not have been permitted within an evolutionary framework if it did not confer an adaptive trait configuration and positive selective advantage within the effective environment of the first hominid populations. Culture therefore was an emergent property of human evolutionary adaptation that was tied to the human brain and a host of related morphological traits. As a result, it succeeded in permitting humans a degree of evolutionary success unrealized by any other organism. It permitted humans not only to span a broad range of niches, but to occupy as well multiple trophic levels.

Cultural Selection & Integration

Cultural selection has been a key factor influencing the evolution of human culture, as it has been a leading or even determining variable in the complex of positive selectional factors that promoted human development. Cultural selection permitted human groups to achieve a form of systemic integration, or rather a functional integration, that came to characterize the configuration of cultural patterning, that was not otherwise possible. This pattern that was the result of cultural integration permitted cultural groupings to function independently in the world as if a unique kind of species, without the necessary genetic trait alterations that would be naturally required for comparable kinds of adaptations in nature. In other words, through cultural selection, a form of non-genetic or phenotypic integration of information was achieved at a superorganic level of human group dynamics, that permitted people to adopt species-specific behavioral and trait complexes. Because these characteristics, not genes, but phemes, which were basically symbolic in structure, and became increasingly linguistic in expression, were primarily phenotypical and not genotypically determined, a function of human phenotypic trait plasticity, they could be acquired environmentally and transmitted horizontally between people. It entail that groups could therefore acquire new cultural trait patterns without having to be genetically preprogrammed for such trait acquisition. It entailed as well the human beings could in fact cross the culture-species barrier in more ways than one, and that cultural patterning could be both back-borrowed and amalgamated--an impossibility for naturally divergent genetic systems.

Human cultural and symbolic integration that has been achieved is not a deterministic or static form of integration. It permits and promotes human adaptability to continuously fluctuating environmental conditions. Such integration made possible the organization of energy and information in human cultural groupings to achieve through cooperative and collective efforts what would otherwise have been impossible. Humans adopted uniquely human characteristics of intra-group organization and cooperation that were unlike that of any other social species--they were not ants or termites in a colony, or musk-ox in a herd, or a pod of dolphins or a pack of wolves. They were not even a troop of baboons or a group of forest Chimpanzees. The most we can expect from such comparison is mere superficial analogy.

Thus, human cultural systems were never completely or totally integrated, and politically and structurally speaking, these forms of integration have taken varying forms over time. The most typical form seems to be one that can be characterized as "authoritarian" of one kind or another, and these authoritarian forms usually represent the hierarchical class stratification between groups within a social boundary. It also reflects I believe a preoccupation of human beings with power and the control over social resources. There is a tendency in any system for there to emerge a competition over complete power, and usually, there occurs some "alpha" that achieves, at least temporarily, relative dominance in the system.

It has been important in human adaptation that cultural systems are never highly integrated, because the partial integration of such systems is the key factor of their adaptive flexibility and long term success. Relatively structured, "totalitarian" systems, tend to be inflexible, and to fail in the long run. They suffer inherently the problem of the politics of power, of the internal succession of leadership.

The basis for the model of cultural anthropogenesis, transculturation, and eco-cultural development of systems, is a basic human evolutionary process that I refer to as cultural selection. Cultural selection is related to the Darwinian term "natural selection" and can be defined therefore as the culturally ordered process of human interference with their natural surroundings. Hunting is an example of cultural selection. We can understand it from a subsistence standpoint as a form of predation and food-getting. But hunting can also involve institutionalized forms of activity that have little or nothing to do with food-getting strategies. Hunters probably often killed other predators as a form of interspecific competition, especially to prevent predation upon themselves. Foraging and browsing really is a form of faunal predation. Fishing is an alternate example of cultural selection. We can say that the domestication of plants and animals has involved consistently patterns of cultural selection which has led to the functional modification of many types of plants and animals to increase their efficiency or utility for human beings. It involved the stampeding of animals into weirs or corrals, netting, trapping, etc. Modifications of the natural environment, by burning, construction, technological innovations, industry, can also result in disturbance of habitat. Furthermore, cultural selection patterns are exhibited indirectly by means of human populational pressures upon the landscape. People acted in a deliberated and concerted manner to modify their environments to their own adaptive advantage. They may have used fires, clearing of forest areas or patches, the construction of shelters, and the making of paths by which to render their environment more predictable and therefore more secure.

Unlike natural selection, which often occurs as a result of chance or stochastic design of natural systems, and is at all points regulated in animals by instinctive behavior, cultural selection invariably involves processes of cultural mediation that includes deliberate planning and goal seeking behavior, use of techniques and tools to increase efficiency and reduce risk associated with such ventures. These are characteristics of human culture that are associated with experiential learning, exploration, trial and error, goal seeking and problem solving intelligence. They are also characteristics relating fundamentally to a symbolic form of cognitive patterning, and to the process of communication of information and sharing and coordination of cultural forms and social behavior. It took the form eventually of natural human language, a characteristic unique to humans for which trait complex humans have evolved into. It took the form of a distinctive style of social patterning as well that was centered on three interrelated complexes: human sexuality; human aggression; and human socialization based upon postponed ontogenetic development and maturation. Prolonged ontogenetic maturation favored in particular larger brains and increasing intelligence in the direction of abstract reasoning and creative imagination. It was a necessary evolutionary outcome of a big brain that required longer periods of post-natal development and cultural-environmental conditioning.

Cultural selection as a significant influence upon human evolution and cultural development, tended to render human adaptation increasingly independent of genetic, instinctive, natural environmental constraints, and forms of natural selection, to just the extent that it rendered human beings fundamentally dependent upon cultural mediation and enculturation to achieve successful adaptation. It has tended to lift humankind from its evolutionary niche and the constraints of natural biological process, and has resulted in the capacity of humankind to systematically, and increasingly, circumvent or else exert a new form of control upon their natural environment.

The evolutionary model has been heavily emphasized as a theoretical framework for explaining human cultural development and social patterning. Ecological explanations make greater sense than pure sociobiological, biocultural and evolutionary explanations that posit invariably some kind of deterministic connection between human genetics and cultural patterning and social organization, and even human mental patterning. Evolution and genetics does account for the rise and development of the morphological trait patterns that are on a basic level associated with human culture--big brains, etc. But these patterns by themselves do not explain in a sufficient manner the cultural behavior and patterning that occurs as a result of the action of this trait complex in its natural or culturally mediated environment. Once cultural patterning was initiated as a result of this complex, it came to increasingly influence itself, creating its own selective conditioning favoring trait development towards greater capacity in culture-trait acquisition.

Cultural mediation that was the result of this process succeeded in unhooking human beings from the constraints of nature. It created what is known as "world openness" for the human species whose subsequent behavior was not strictly determined by genetics, but increasingly by phenotypic expression and environmental modifications. Cultural mediation therefore created its own set of built-in constraints, and became thereby a feedback system such that culturally modified environmental conditions served as the basis for constraining further human evolution and ontogenetic development. Human beings capable of realizing culturally based traits on average probably succeeded better than individuals who were less capable. There must have been at this stage an early form of intraspecific competition between humans and between groups of human beings. Such competition fostered the sociality and social conditioning of human beings, favoring affiliation with larger and larger groups that came into increasing environmental competition with one another.

Cultural Equilibriation & Structuration

Achieved cultural integration of a human system entails that a cultural grouping will attain a kind of steady-state adaptive equilibrium in its environmental surroundings (including social environments). Equilibrium is a preferred state of most cultural systems as they foster a security and long term stability of the system that permits people the margin for productive and reproductive success that they strive for in the world. Cultural equilibrium has several characteristics. Like other kinds of equilibrium systems, it provides its people a stable center and reference point, such that if the system is somehow perturbed, efforts will automatically be made to restore the balance of the system to a state of equilibrium. This can be framed in terms of cultural tradition and inherent conservatism of culture that is often downright coercive in its exaction of conformity to its constraints and sanctions, but I believe this is not the only or even necessarily the best way of understanding this complex kind of phenomenon. There appears to be an inherent resistance to change and a fundamental inertia to the new in human systems, and yet all systems depend upon the regular flux and input of new information and replacement of new resources and even people, to remain viable. It depends foremost on the ability to continuously rework old forms to fit new situations, and this is achieved as much functionally as it is symbolically--in fact the two forms are of the same coin and currency of human systems. Cultural institutions normally provide mechanisms by which this process is achieved, albeit these institutions and their methods vary substantially between different cultural configurations. Equilibrium depends, for one thing, upon cultural selection and selective transculturation--cultures must be capable of redefining their integrative patterns in a manner that permit them to adapt to new and changing circumstances in a successful manner.

I have adopted from the social theorist the term "structuration" and I have applied this term to the understanding of the kinds of on-going, day-to-day ways that cultural patterning is reiterated, reintegrated and reinforced such that the present is made to seem continuous with the sense of past, and I have therefore adopted the equivalent term "equilibriation" to refer to the continuous process of maintaining a kind of shifting and dynamic social and cultural (and even cognitive) equilibrium with an ever changing social environment.

In this model of equilibriation, it must be understood that the future prospects for any cultural group are never certain and are always subject to risks and unintended consequences that may affect the outcomes of any decision that is made that will affect the disposition of a cultural configuration or its modification.

It is understandable therefore than in normal circumstances, a premium should be placed upon maintaining the status quo of a system without significant modification, if every change brings with it the implication of risk and future insecurity. Equilibriation refers us to the efforts of people from day to day to maintain the sense of cultural adaptive balance, especially by means of "not rocking the boat." But it also entails the capacity for undertaking decisive action when action is called for. The challenge of equilibriation, like the related process of structuration, maintains the on-going integration of a cultural patterning that is so important to a cultural system. It is a process therefore that situates cultural change in the historical present of stage-actors who are caught up in the unfolding drama of their cultural play.

Transculturation & Systemic Integration: Civilizational Process

The basis of human cultural development I argue to be a general form of selective acculturation that I refer to as transculturation. Transculturation involves the systemic development of hypernetworks as a result of horizontal cultural transmission and pattern diffusion. No single culture may be the source of stimulus diffusion, rather it is the system of interconnection that results in the spread of new traits and complexes. It entails therefore the development of a social and inter-cultural context within which patterns of reciprocity are established in some order.

Essentially, horizontal cultural transmission usually entails some measure of reciprocal relations, and hence most often of two way exchanges. Therefore, cultural patterning tends to be spread out and serves to regionally integrate various or different cultural groupings within a common system, or civilizational complex. Early fur trade in North America created these transculturative patterns among most North American Indian tribes during the Fur trade era. As long as trading contacts were a source of valued Western goods, especially guns and black powder, long distance trading networks naturally developed by which some tribal grouping served as intermediaries or as primaries in relation to other groups. Pariah middle-man groups arose, associated with the half-breed Metis, who became the key mediators of this transculturative system. Rendezvous complexes then became important annual and even seasonal events that attracted members from many different tribes for purposes of exchange on multiple levels. The kind of civilization that thus became articulated during this period of time in North America must be described as a native system that was fundamentally shaped by the values and material possession of items of the fur trade. Thus, native American cultures became critically influenced during this time by these transculturative processes based upon networks through which guns, whisky, furs, beads and brides regularly passed.

I imagine the spectacular development of the cave art during the Magdelanean in France and Northern Spain may have been the locus for another form of transculturative process. Those who possessed control over these cave complexes, may have had held a privileged monopoly over a form of magical power that would probably have been considered great in relation to other neighboring groups who did not have such caves. It would make sense to consider that these cave complexes may have also existed at the heart of a larger system of exchange, perhaps of basic material items like amber, ivory, or other fetish objects fashioned by people, and might have been based upon a kind of pre-herding adaptation and reliance upon the hunting of large herds across the primeval forests and fields of Western Europe.

Each new technological invention or innovation, the use of fire, the invention of the wheel, horse-riding, the sling, the bow and arrow, the boat, would have resulted in the formation of a new pattern of transculturation and the rise of new civilizational systems. There is no reason to believe that designs and devices like the wheel, fire or the boat were arrived at all at once. Rather, most of these innovations were achieved by trial and error and by experimentation and elimination of less efficient designs in favor of greater efficiency, that would have driving their development and widespread adoption. Adoption and transmission often entails some measure of modification in the process as well. People will borrow things from their distant neighbors, including new ideas, and adapt these to their own context and needs. The stone hammer used to beat to death a small game animal might be found to be effective in crushing open shell fish or nuts, or may be modified subsequently to become more efficient at this process. Thus, transmission itself often probably entailed a form of built-in innovation, hence the more frequently and widely something would get transmitted, the more likely that thing would evolve and be developed into a wider range of pattern variation. Widespread diffusion would probably also entail a modicum of built-in stimulus diffusion at the same time, as those things that become traded and exchanged at long distance can sometimes serve as the touchstone for new design innovations and rethinking old forms that might reverberate through cultural systems and affect cultural patterning upon multiple levels of its integrative expression. People are not just trading the thing, like the silk worm, but they are trading the entire technological process and cultural complex that is based upon the thing being traded, along with the know-how involved to reproduce this complex. Metallurgy is a case in point. Superior bronze implements would have been preferred over softer copper headed tools, and iron would have followed bronze. The knowledge of how to make bronze or iron probably did not transmit as quickly or as widely as the products of this industry did, but eventually the knowledge and ability to make iron implements would become widespread. Certain groups would strive to maintain a monopoly over these technologies, just as the wealthy west today strives to maintain a monopoly of technological know-how over the undeveloped world.

If we go backwards from bronze and copper to previous stone-age technologies, we must speculate on the relative merits and superiority of some forms of lithic technology over other alternative forms. Surely, new innovations in stone technology had the same kinds of transculturative effects in paleolithic, Mesolithic and early neolithic times as did metallurgy at a later time, although such advances might be considered minor and piecemeal by contemporary standards. Surely, prismatically striking blades off a central core, with the ability to rework the edges, proved a much more efficient means of manufacturing multiple "disposable blades" than depending upon flaking at oblique angles across the surface of a core and then reworking the edges.

It meant that cores could be carried long distance and used repeatedly before having to be replaced. It meant that superior kinds of stones that kept sharper edges and had greater cutting power could be selectively used over cruder kinds of stones that did not hold as sharp or as strong an edge. It meant that the hunter could forage over wider ranges and at longer distances and greater intervals, without having to worry about coming short of efficient weapons. Microblades must surely be associated with the rise of bow-and arrow complexes, as opposed to the reliance upon spears with heavier heads. Heavy headed spears were probably inefficient for the hunting of gracile deer or antelope, but may have been preferred for the hunting of heavier bear or bison. The point at which micro-blade technologies, or similar technologies suitable for the use of bows and arrows, emerged, probably indicated a general shift away from reliance on heavy, slow moving game, towards greater dependence on faster and less risky to hunt game. It meant, among other things, that individual or small groups of hunters could by themselves go out and safely procure sufficient game for their home party. The use of the bow and arrow and its preference over a spear was probably influenced by the rise of warfare patterns. A bow and arrow would have been a quite efficient means of dispatching an enemy, as people are not much larger than a deer, and shooting at a distance is always safer and less risky than having to close at short range.

It seems to me in thinking about the implications of transculturational process, that the archaeological context must have a means of incorporating a wider region of archaeological information together into a system, a civilizational or transculturative complex, than is available in a given area. It strikes me as a form of regional analysis that goes beyond the attempt to piece together the more local level or areal systems based upon home ranges and differential food-getting strategies. How frequently might hunting parties form in one area, to go on long range expeditions into the territories of known enemies, if not in search of game, then in search of war-trophies such as scalps or heads. It becomes possible, in other words, to use evidence derived from many different sites that are presumed to share a contemporaneous or similar period, to find evidence for long-distance transculturative patterns that would have been the bases of regional integration into a larger system.

In this regard, symbolic forms such as fetish symbols or other abstract representations should not be underestimated as indicative of some form of transculturative process occurring based upon a regional scale of integration. One thing about many of the Venus fetish figurines is that they are highly stylized in basic traits and overall form, and this stylization suggests the symbolic articulation of such civilizational complex. The occurrence and spread, for instance, of Astarte figurines during the early Iron age across the Aegean into the Middle East is an example of a similar kind of civilizational complex that is obviously associated with a religious system of belief and worship.

Transculturation and Cultural Selection

Cultural selection is the process by which people choose over alternatives, the choices which result in the determination of pattern for a system. Cultural selection has evolutionary implications in that cultural selection processes often function in a manner that is understood for processes of natural selection, and often in both cases, the consequences are very analogous if not also homologous. Natural selection will result in some kind of speciational variation and development of a population. Cultural selection on the other hand leads invariably to some form of cultural differentiation of pattern at the level of the group. The central aspect of cultural selection is that it is fundamentally arbitrary, even though it may involve both conscious and unconscious or culturally constrained decision making and deliberation. Cultural selection must be seen therefore as a the influence of human rationality and logic upon the choices we may make and consequences that follow. We may follow a rational calculus, or just a rationalized calculus, or we may follow the cultural calculus that has been handed down to us and that is reinforced at every turn in our social life.

Transculturation then can be understood as the process by which some kind of design innovation becomes adopted and diffused, and eventually, universally accepted by human populations in spite of cultural boundaries and symbolic differentials that might otherwise interfere with such transmission processes. Things that become transculturated can be understood as those things that confer, almost without exception, some kind of adaptive value for a population, whether these be computers, microwaves, satellite dishes or, in a much earlier time, just crude stone tools. The mastery and control of fire is an example of transculturation. It may have been independently originated on numerous occasions, perhaps not to catch on or to become somehow extinguished before the concept of the use of fire could be transmitted very far abroad. It is evident though that the custom of building hearths and of making fire by one means or another, must have been easily recognized by our proto-hominids as an important source of warmth and security at night, and also as a means for cooking and assisting in the manufacture of tools, etc. People seeing the use of fire in action, and recognizing its positive value, were quick to seize the idea and adopt the innovation into their life-style. We might say that a transcultural phenomenon of a fire-complex arose to which, eventually, everyone subscribed. The innovation and widespread adoption of fire must have been a dramatic event for hominid evolution, as I believe it marked an important cultural step in which the hearth became a focal point of a groups cultural adaptation, and in which the processing and storage of meat could be contemplated and planned beyond the possibility of immediate consumption. At the same time, the actual acquisition and spread of the culture of fire use may have been rather gradual and slow to catch on. Some primitive groups may have even resisted the notion of domesticating fire for some time, though it would be hard now at this late state of our cultural development to think of a reason why this would be so.

Transculturation of devices takes two kinds I believe. The first is the transformation of the thing or complex being transmitted due to the adaptation of the complex to new or varying conditions. The second is the back-transmission of complexes for which one or more design innovations have been adopted. The first principle relies on the fact that cultural groups that already possess a certain complex the use, form and disposition of which may be culturally constrained, may be in fact unlikely to adopt significant innovations of the form or structure. It may instead be more likely to innovate the original thing into a variety of sub-types that might serve different purposes. Things and complexes that get transmitted across cultural boundaries, and hence across environmental settings, are more likely to be picked up and modified in their adaptation to a different set of needs.

The second type of transculturation, would involve the back-transmission of things that were modified or adopted on a wider scale, which means that there occurs a kind of feedback process by which trait complexes may become continuously modified and refined within a larger context, resulting in the elaboration and wide-scale adoption of a complex within a system.

The problem of transculturation refers us to the transformative effects of design innovations that leads to their selective adoption and accommodation within a cultural system, and across different cultural systems. Transculturation can be thought of as a special form of acculturation, the effects of which are usually seen as being positive and integrative, rather than destructive or disintegrative. With transculturation, the important thing being transmitted is not the object or the behavior itself, but the principle of the design of the object and its associated knowledge and functionality for a culture. Often, it is the idea alone that gets transmitted, once being observed and understood for its practical value, resulting in the stimulus diffusion of a trait-complex by means of its modeling and reconstruction.

Transculturation therefore refers us to the technical aspects of complexes and devices that have some functional value in human adaptation, but this may include ideas and symbolic devices as well that may have no other functional significance except that they may be a part of a ritual process or a wider belief system of which they are a part. I see the Venus figurines that appear in Europe with the rise of the great cave art, as possibly representing the first transmission of religious ideas that may have had to do with rites of fertility and fecundity, and may also have represented a belief in an anthropomorphic spirit or deity. Such a belief system would represent to me a rising level of social consciousness as well, an awareness of self and other in self-conscious relationship with one another, indicating awareness of differences between people.

On the other hand, such figurines may have been part of a magical rite or formula that conferred some properties to its handler or owner. If fertility was an essential concern, either the fertility of a person, or of an animal possibly, it reflected a conception of religion and belief in which spirits may have had an influence in the process of conception and birth. Either way, the transmission of these characteristic figurines represented a form of transculturation of an idea and an object that may have had no other functional significance than its symbolic or ritual or magical power, and was related to, indeed, partly representative of, a rather specific civilizational complex that took form and had great significance at this time in a rather broad context that spanned many different possible cultural adaptive patterns.

Transculturation is a process that is critically tied to cultural development and to the process of the integration of human systems into civilizational complexes. It is the means by which patterns of cultural innovation and invention in relation to human functional adaptation, becomes transmitted and diffused and universally incorporated by a large number of different cultural groupings. Inventions and innovations may not necessarily be achieved all at once, but may occur through a series of refinements and adjustments that lead to the realization of the full potential of a particular kind of device or technical system.

Fire may have been encountered many times before its possible functionality, or the fact that it may be kept in a controlled state, became realized. The realization that fire had possible uses may not have occurred all at the same time, but may have been worked out over time, either by accident or by deliberate cunning. I imagine the original proto-humans would have had a built-in fear of fire that had to be overcome in its domestication, and it is this kind of fear that would have had an influence of resistance to its adoption. That fire had power to destroy things must have been evident as well, and that fire would be associated with magic and spirits was also a part of a developing fire complex.

The adaptive significance and transculturative consequences of controlled use of fire should not be underestimated. Fire clearly provided human beings with a selective advantage over a range natural processes and forces they did not otherwise have, and their mastery of it entailed their growing capacity to learn and master other aspects and forces of their world as well.

Transculturation is therefore more about the acquisition and transmission of critical knowledge than it is about the diffusion of things or traits across a cultural landscape. It is a form of knowledge which has a transformative effect not only upon the adaptive patterning of groups, but upon the social and noetic-symbolic aspects of group process. Transculturation is a basic civilizational process that confers to all people who are capable of possessing and using such knowledge more adaptively successful in changing and variable environments.

Human civilization, as both a process and a pattern of traits, tends to be integrative and progressive in its patterning of adaptational achievements and acquisition of new knowledge. This process has been occurring for a very long time, and we should not underestimate the extent of detail and expertise, and the body of experience, that becomes represented by various trait-complexes within cultural traditions and civilizations. Civilization provides a sense of tradition that may in fact transcend ethnoculturally defined boundaries, and that may encompass, as a "great tradition" many local traditions. This reflects the notion that in the rise of transculturative civilizational complexes, knowledge and symbolic reality may become essentially stratified between different levels of organization and integration. This sense of stratification of worldview has important implications I believe for the organization of experience and of behavior and the differential patterns of social relation and reciprocity that become established. It entails more complex forms of social organization than would be found with a single locus of a small group context, and it would involve therefore the inauguration of social rituals and mythologies that would serve to reinforce and legitimize asymmetrically structured relationships that would occur between different people.

The basis of a civilizational complex is a cultural tradition, or, alternatively, the interaction of a plurality of cultural traditions, in a manner that leads to constructive feedback and growth of knowledge and adaptive capacity for a system. Cultural loss and regression is not an uncommon occurrence, and when great civilizations collapse, as the Roman empire finally did in the Fifth Century AD, it can leave a structural and noetic vacuum that represents a tremendous loss of knowledge and experience. Much of the knowledge lost will be permanent. At the same time, I doubt that such a system, though broken down and disintegrated, or rather atomized by a larger power vacuum, would completely regress. Iron technology was still common, and much basic knowledge still retained that permitted people to adapt to their world. Though broken down, an internalized sense of symbolic and social stratification would still continue, though being without a central focus, and perhaps shifting its focus to a new concentric orientation.

It is evident in Europe that the influence of the Christian Church during the Dark Ages was critical to the emergence of a Medieval and modern European cultural identity that was transformed from the previous identities of people during the period of the Roman empire. Slavery, a common and widespread institution during the Roman period, took the form of a latifundian economy in which slaves were no better than cattle. The influence of Christian thought and doctrine that taught the spiritual value and equality of all people, including slaves, lead to a complete breakdown of the old institutional framework of latifundian style cartel slavery by the 10^th Century, during which brief period of time there was an unusual degree of freedom from forced constraint felt universally throughout Europe. This period of freedom was in fact transitional, and led rapidly to the reinstitution of an alternate form of involuntary servitude in the form of serfdom in which peasants were tethered permanently to their plots of land in obligation to a feudal lord or vassal.

Transculturation can be seen as a fundamental process of human civilization that is more than just about the dissemination of new ideas and knowledge systems or the diffusion of the trait complexes that are associated with these ideas. It is about the symbolic transformation of the collective consciousness of humanity, and the social organization of reality in a manner that achieves some larger sense of collective or superorganic order, if most often at the expense of individual freedoms and achievements. As a result of transculturation, human beings came to see themselves increasingly as actors in a social performance, members of a larger social entity, purveyors and protectors of a grander sense of tradition, than they previously realized for themselves. A genuine sense of social consciousness, in a Durkheimian sense of mechanical solidarity, would have emerged and had a critical impact on the human psyche.

What is achieved generally through positive processes of transculturation would be the structural and symbolic and functional integration of human cultural reality, for the achievement overall of greater adaptive productivity and reproductive success of the group or of some select members of a group, even if at the expense of others members of the group or members of some outgroup. Transculturation can be seen to have had a social evolutionary consequence upon human cultural, social and psychological patterning, as it would have resulted in the creation of new niche relations and conditions within the surrounding framework of a natural environment.

Positive transculturation must be seen therefore as a synthesizing and integrative process that involves environmental-ecological, symbolic and social-relational aspects at the same time. In other words, it is transformational for the entire cultural patterning of a group, and tends therefore to result in cultural development and drift through time. Its consequences will be evidenced at all levels of socio-cultural and cultural psychological integration.

This evolutionary consequence of transculturation can be expressed clearly in terms of a fundamental principle relating typically to human ontogenetic development:

1. The higher the level of transculturative integration achieved by a group within a larger civilizational complex, the more delayed and involved will be the post-partum processes of child development.

2. The higher the level of transculturative integration, the more secondary processes of enculturation and socialization will play a role in child development, and the more restrictive will be the secondary institutions sanctioning and constraining behavior and belief within a group context.

3. The higher the level of transculturative development that is achieved, the more these social control mechanisms will be internalized psychologically into the personality of the individual, and the more differentiated and embedded will be that individuals overall pattern of cultural response and behavior.

4. Relatively high levels of transculturative development, even under relatively primitive technological conditions, may result in the development of rather sophisticated and elaborated patterns of primary and secondary response and behavior.

5. We would expect to find, in archaeological systems where there is significant evidence of transculturative process and development occurring, as for instance with the cave-art civilization that arose in France and Spain during the Magdelanean, a relatively high degree of integrative cultural patterning in terms of the basic cultural model: i. e., 1. in terms of ecological-environmental adaptation (sophistication and specialization of technology, exemplified by the elaboration and variation of form and function; 2.in terms of the complex social organization and relational patterns achieved within and between groups; 3. in terms of the relative level of symbolic development and sophistication of knowledge achieved socially by a group, which might be reflected for instance, in the rise of ritual or craft specialists, specialized oratory or leadership, hunting skills, medical abilities, etc.

In other words, if in archaeological assemblages we may infer a relatively high degree of sophistication and development in terms of distinctive trait patterns that appear widespread, we may infer for the possessors of these patterns a relatively advanced or elaborated state of cultural patterning compared to a similar level or contemporaneous grouping lacking such civilizational refinements. Patterning of material evidence should somehow reflect this kind of achieved differential available to empirical comparative analysis.

These effects are the result of transculturative processes, and reflect the property of culture that it is contextually determined to a great extent, by the social and adaptive patterning of relations and group life. Children born into a group will rise to the level of that group and, on average no further. Their phenotypic plasticity will be shaped by the indirect constraints and conventions permitted by the cultural patterning of the social environment in which they are born and raised. Transculturation reflects a natural inclination both to achieve a maximum potential for development defined by the state of the art of a current technology, and to, in a disintegrative or negative form, to frustrate or limit such development. The evolution of cultural development in humans was fully isotropic and mirrored by the evolution of increasing periods of child development that was marked by degrees of social and symbolic dependency. A child reared with wolves will develop the cultural traits shared by wolves, and will rise little further than this. A child born of academic professors will adopt and rise to the level of their parents, on average.

Behind the model of transculturative process that accounts for cultural patterning and the formation of civilizational complexes and systems, is a presumption about the psychic unity of humankind. In other words, any group of people have the innate symbolic and intellectual capacity to rise to the maximum limits of their technological-environmental base, and within these constraints are capable of demonstrating an almost endless and very elaborative patterning of expressive variation and refinement. This presumption is basically true, universally true, for modern Homo sapiens. I do not think it can be applied with equal force the deeper in time we go, especially when we arrive a paleontological hominid specimens that exhibit marked differences in terms of cranial morphology. At the same time, even for contemporaneous or historically defined cultural patterns, this notion of the psychic unity of humankind must be conditionally and contextually defined by the relativistic considerations of the cultural patterning that is already in place. That transculturation is context-driven as a basic process is evident in the fact that almost no human beings, except perhaps for feral children displaced from their natural social environments, will be born and raised in a cultural vacuum. For most of humanity, some form of cultural and civilizational patterning was already in place, defined socially and environmentally within a larger context, and this has a profound shaping and constraining influence on the resulting development of the personality and patterning of the individual in the world. Effectively a priori cultural patterning will have a critical influence upon the resulting patterning of development of the child who is enculturated into that system.

Of course, in human prehistory, not all cultural patterning was full-blown, emergent upon the stage from the first curtain. The aim is to explain how this cultural patterning may have emerged in the first place, within which, as a kind of feedback process, human nature became increasingly socialized and dependent upon cultural context for its development. In this regard, all cultural development achieved by people can be seen as relatively to the group that it occurs within. These norms and standards would vary considerably between different groups and reflect fundamentally differential patterns of adaptation in different situations and niches. A culture of people who are raised by people would see nothing inherently wrong or bad with wolf-like behavior, and would adopt probably a form of cultural patterning and integration that would reflect or model wolf social behavior in many ways. Of course, for humans not evolutionarily designed to be wolves, this patterning would probably be detrimental in the long run and result in a low probability of survival for the members of the group. They could never, for instance, compete with real wolves, nor could they ever compete with human beings raised upon a more human model.

The interest of transculturative theory is therefore to explain the original rise of cultural developmental patterning and its variation of demonstration in differential cultural contexts. Archaeological systems might contribute to this kind of understanding in at least two ways. First it can seek in the archaeological record evidence for cultural development and transculturation in terms of changes and acquisition of trait complexes. Such transculturation seeks to understand how a system will change and become elaborated overtime in natural cycles of growth, maturity and eventual disintegration. Secondly, it can seek to define, for any given process or complex of historical development, the cultural context in which it occurs in terms of the tripartite analytical model of cultural patterning. It can find this in the consistency of elements and sharing that occurs both across space and through time, especially I believe in those trait complexes that are basic and "intrinsic" to any site formation that is considered a part or representative of a larger complex.

If almost no human beings have been bereft of some kind of transculturative context for the past three or four million years, it is equally true that all such transculturative contexts have been for the most part "underdetermined" in the sense that they are never completely successful in achieving integration or in the conditioning and subsequent control of individual behavioral response. Continuous environmental fluctuations will result in a shifting of the integrative parameters of a system, and will therefore result in a challenge for any cultural grouping to continuously seek to modify its cultural context in a manner that will achieve greater integration. There is a sense that if cultural context becomes too confining, too much the traditional straitjacket of the tribal model of conservative culture, then a society will fail to achieve the degree of modification and elaborative variation necessary for its basic trait-complexes, and will in the long run experience a crises in which its own cultural context is no longer functionally adaptive in a larger world. Mazeway reformulation, or symbolic crises and reintegration, resulting in what might be called a cultural frameshift, is often necessary to accomplish social reorganization. It is not uncommon to see groups, even highly civilized and technologically civilized societies, to seek symbolic kinds of solutions to what amount to ecological and adaptational kinds of problems, because, for whatever reason, they seem incapable of redefining an ecological mode of adaptation.

There is a sense as well that, for as long as human cultural organization has existed, there has occurred some form of overarching transculturative process that has tended in the long run to exert a transformative influence upon the cultural patterning of different groups that fall within is sphere. This influence can be thought of in the manner of Anthony Giddens as a kind of structurational process that tends to reshape human thinking, behavior and social relations from day to day and from one situation to the next. In the framework of Herskovit's Cultural Dynamics, it is the continuous elaboration of different individuals upon a cultural focus, which process leads to a gradual shift and intensification of the focal aspects of a cultural trait complex. Humans have therefore from the "beginning" experienced gradually increasing levels of both cultural constraint and conditioning and transculturative processes that are usually part of a larger social framework.

We make an analytical distinction therefore between the cultural context of group life within which an individual is born and raised, and probably in reference to which may live and die. At the same time, we make a distinction of the transculturative context which implies some form of intergroup patterning of relation. It is evident that in reality, in which achievement of effective, adaptive integration is at a premium, that the two patterns and their resulting contextual configurations will interact and to some extent overlap with one another. Rules and patterns of mate exchange and exogamy are indicative of a kind of transculturative process that has consequences both in terms of a transculturative context and a cultural-group context patterning. In a patrilineal, patrilocal society, it is evident that a young female will be born and raised within one family, only by her socially defined maturity be sold or traded off in marriage to another group context with which there might otherwise be no other affiliation. It is understandable in such contexts that there would be relatively low status-regard for young female daughter's in law, and that the role of the mother-in-law would become exaggerated in later life. To some extent, the cultural life of one group would become transplanted into the framework of the other group via the daughter as a mother, especially in reference to her own sons. Cases in which a black nanny might be responsible for nurturing and raising the children of white slave owners, is an interesting situation in which transculturative processes effectively cross cultural boundaries on one level or another. So would, by extension, other forms of trade and exchange have multi-level implications and reverberations for the overall patterning of integration of a system.

Cultural Equilibriation & Human Systems Integration

Carrying capacity can be defined as a density dependent relationship to a populations environment. Carrying capacity is the basis for determining equilibrium of a group, or K, which can be defined as the point of natural population increase beyond which rates of death due to stress upon the environment comes into balance with rates of increase. It is clear, that different species that occupy different eco-trophic niches achieve different levels of K. Different species, of different modes of adaptation, body size and rates of population increase, will undergo different cycles of "bloom and doom" or "rise and demise" following a cyclical pattern of periodic-phase oscillation. These life-cycles of natural populations are to a great extent determined by the relative K achieved by the population. We might cite the following kind of general rule applicable to most living systems:

The lower the level of carrying capacity (K) achievable by a particular kind of living system, the more rapid and shorter-lived its periodic life-cycle as a population is likely to be, and this periodicity of life-cycle will tend to be strongly correlated with the periodicity of life-cycle of the individual member of the population.

Similarly, we can precisely say that human populations, especially when defined within a natural setting, as we can assume that our precursors would have been, followed exactly the same basic patterns of natural life cycles and achievement of carrying capacity. We can say that cultural mediation and selection patterns have fundamentally affected these processes, and has resulted in the achievement of new forms of equilibrium and complex carrying capacity that would not be permitted under completely natural conditions of human adaptation. We can state the following rule:

The carrying capacity of any human population is directly correlated and proportional to its level of achieved cultural development.

The higher the carrying capacity of a cultural system, the greater and more stable the population densities of this system can be assumed to be.

All cultural systems have a normal life cycle, and will eventually cease to exist. Its people will perish, migrate or become culturally transformed into a new cultural system.

While these rules may obviously apply to sedentary systems based upon agriculture and domestication of plants and animals, it may be somewhat less obvious how this general rule may apply with equal force to previous more primitive systems that lacked domestication of food-resources and that depended upon the natural availability and abundance found in nature. I would claim that the same principles held true at even a fairly early epoch of human prehistory, and that these were based upon the achievement of adaptive food-getting and processing technologies that permitted human beings to more efficiently and effectively exploit their natural environments. Such systems could not have achieved the level of carrying capacity possible under more advanced systems of agricultural intensification, etc., but it is still worthwhile to consider the possibilities that prime resource rich regions, with the proper suite of cultural technologies available, remarkable levels of population increase might have been achieved. Such systems would probably experience rather short trajectories and life-cycles just the same, perhaps rising and falling within just a few generations, unless other factors, such as relative cultural isolation or the achievement of cultural mechanisms of internal regulation were achieved that sustained relatively high optimum densities for an indefinite period of time.

Human carrying-capacity in any environmental setting would be fundamentally culturally determined by the kinds of food-getting and social regulating technologies and systems that could be put into place and maintained over the long term. The capacity of a cultural group to achieve adaptation to the level that maximizes its given carrying capacity, based upon the available technology and social patterning and organization, is a mark of the success of that group. We should not expect groups possessing only a stone-age tool technology and basic horticultural practices to be capable of achieving the levels of equilibrium and social integration that would be achievable, for instance, with iron technology and agricultural knowledge. If we look to pre-contact New Guinea highland societies, we see stone age cultures with a pig-horticultural complex achieving remarkable degrees of equilibrium and relatively high levels of carrying capacity. We also find chronic patterns of warfare, reports of cannibalism, and a typical headhunting complex that was characteristic through the Southeast Asian region.

Human cultures in general can be said to strive for long-term equilibrium, but this general rule is not without noteworthy exceptions. It is not uncommon for the equilibrating mechanisms available to a cultural group, namely its symbolic system and its social order, to begin to function in a counteradaptive manner that leads to a pattern of self-destructive behavior by the group as a whole. This pattern is in fact not uncommon in known human history.

Cultural equilibrium should not be confused with the conservativism of an unchanging or resistant cultural tradition. I believe that traditions may in fact have been continuously reworked and reshaped over time to suit new sets of needs under new environmental circumstances. Cultural equilibrium reflects rather the health of a cultural grouping to adapt to and succeed in a variety of changing environmental circumstances. It entails their capacity to achieve some sense of compromise and balance between their cultural values and the external realities that force changes from preferred styles and modes of behavior or belief.

Dynamic Cultural Succession

I have made a claim that cultural patterning has always existed in some kind of larger cultural context that is defined by its relationships with both the natural and social environment. Whatever the internal dynamics of a cultural group in time and place, that group will be subject to the influence and behavior of other cultural groupings, either directly in contact, or indirectly through some intermediate sets of variables like shifting environmental patterns, resource availability, etc. We cannot construe any cultural grouping as existing in complete isolation in time and place from other cultural groupings that surrounded it. Isolation of any cultural grouping would, in the long run, have meant evolutionary extinction for that grouping. We can make a case that even cultural groupings that occurred on remote Islands of the Pacific, for instance, did not experience total isolation, but were in general networked into trade and political webs that extended across different island chains and that consisted of regular expeditions sent between the different islands.

From a systems point of view, this would entail that whatever a cultural grouping may or may not achieve in its home range context, it would be periodically and chronically subject to external pressures and changes that would occur in the larger system that would have some kind of affect on the patterning of the group and that would be essentially beyond the capacity of the group to control except in terms of maintaining effective cultural boundaries or distancing mechanisms that prevent or inhibit with a high threshold some forms of acculturative contact. We can call this larger context the framework of acculturation that prevails in a certain region during a certain period of time.

In a supracultural or "transcultural" perspective, it is not so much the individual cultural patterning of any particular grouping in time or space that is so important, so much as it is the overall patterning of interrelationships and exchange dynamics occurring throughout regionally structured systems that may be, in the structure of the long run, more important to consider. In other words, larger structural patterns underlying intercultural relationships may predominant in a region that encompasses a range of different cultural patterns that are to some degree constrained and shaped by these overarching influences. A case can be made that situationally, one cultural grouping may be replaced by another, and the outcome within the larger acculturative framework would still be more or less the same.

I have adapted a model of dynamic cultural succession from similar models of community succession developed in ecological theory, as I believe this way of seeing cultural patterning and change in its larger social historical context is important to a systems approach. This model can be found to articulate on several interrelated levels:

1. An overall order of patterning of cultural developmental sequence from primary and basic cultural patterning to secondary, elaborated and derivative institutional patterning.

2. An expected sequence of cultural succession for any particular group within a regional framework that in general runs from primary to intermediate to advanced forms of socio-cultural adaptation and organization, depending upon highest achieved technological knowledge base characteristic of that phase or place and period.

3. An expected sequence of cultural succession that is regionally defined by ecozones such that upon peripheral margins of core-resource rich areas, there is a succession toward the ecological center at which the more advanced forms of cultural developmental patterning are expected to occur.

4. An overall regional stability of transcultural systems such that, whatever the successional dynamics occurring for any one particular cultural grouping or phase, the overall system in which this is occurring is more or less stable.

5. Regional and interregional succession will occur for larger transcultural systems and civilizational complexes, such that the structural order established for one regional phase will eventually become replaced by the structural order achieved by successive regional phases.

6. Natural life-cycles of social patterning of groups and systems at all levels can be expected to occur, such that each group will have its beginning, development, stable or mature phase, and its subsequent period of decline. Just as we can claim that cultural patterning is stratified on several levels of integration, so too can we see that the cycles that characterize this pattern is occurring at multiple levels as well. There are smaller cycles embedded within larger cycles, which contextualize and constrain the succession of the smaller embedded cycles.

It is apparent that the age-area model in the interpretation of patterns of diffusion and dialectical differentiation of language is applicable to an understanding of the patterning of regional and interregional succession phases and regimes.

The definition of culture that this model depends upon understands cultural patterning to be naturally stratified upon several different levels of articulation and integration at the same time. Thus we may identify the individual, the primary group, the secondary group, the tertiary and even quaternary groups, and we can identify as well the larger transcultural context as exemplifying dynamic cultural processes and patterns. We find therefore cultural patterning to be complexly stratified upon multiple levels simultaneously. Though the levels are interdependent to some extent, these interdependencies are not completely determining at the different levels of cultural articulation. The resulting structure is complex but not rigid. Individual patterning may be constrained and shaped by the group cultural patterning of the family or the larger groups within which the family is situated. There may be inherent subcultural and cross-cultural influences that cross-cut the influence of the primary or secondary group, and serve to remove the individual from the framework of the group. All groups are also defined at least implicitly within a larger cross-cultural or transculturational framework that exhibits its own heterogeneous cultural patterning that may have a shaping or constraining influence upon any patterns within it.

Cultural succession can be seen therefore to operate simultaneously upon all levels of cultural patterning and to lead to different kinds of consequences at these different levels. At the same time, the model of cultural selection can be fit into a larger framework of the more general model of eco-cultural evolution, such that we may see in the long term patterns of cultural succession the gradual rise and fall of great civilizations, and the sowing of seeds in the wake of such civilizations for the rise of entirely new waves of cultural entities.

We may adapt a model for cultural systems as follows:

1. Cultural systems tend towards growth and increasing symbolic-institutional elaboration in both extensive and intensive ways. We can say that cultural systems gradually develop from basic, primitive systems toward more differentiated and complexly integrated systems.

2. All cultural systems exist within a delimited ecological-environmental framework of time and place, which framework sets basic limits and constraints to the growth and development of such systems.

3. Patterns towards increasing growth and differentiation result in cyclical patterns of periodic alternation and replacement once the basic limits of the system have been overreached by its development.

From this model of cultural succession, we may hypothesize that, under stable conditions of optimal adaptational equilibrium, communities will achieve what can be referred to as an eco-cultural climax that represents the highest level of differentiation, heterogeneity and complexity possible within the constraints operating over that system. Larger regional transcultural systems may exist in the long run with a level of stability that makes its systems and subsystems relatively long-lived at the level of eco-cultural climax.

Eco-Evolutionary Systems and Counteradaptational Strategies

The framework of cultural succession must be understood within a larger framework in which eco-cultural adaptations of cultural systems can be said to constitute a complex set of ecosystemic relationships and community dynamics upon several levels of articulation within a larger framework. All such systems can be said to be by definition partially open systems. Such systems can be said to comprise their own metabiotic communities that set the tune for the eco-trophic pyramid operating within the contexts of that system.

All such systems at the same time can be said to have existed within a larger field of macroscopic, or regional/interregional relationships that can be described as transculturational in pattern. Different groups interacted with one another in different ways, with a range of possible outcomes. To a great extent, we can posit therefore the operation of coevolutionary eco-cultural systems within a larger metabiotic context in which the developments occurring within one system would influence and lead to equilibrating responses occurring in other systems. Furthermore, if networks are highly developed and widespread, it is possible that the dynamics occurring in one system may affect indirectly the dynamics of many other systems that are not directly in contact to this system, if it results in reverberations of the regional transcultural system that leads to a chain reaction or domino effect influencing many different cultures.

We can expect there to arise therefore co-evolutionary cultural systems in which the parameters of one's groups cultural development and its resulting state-path trajectory is the direct or indirect consequence and response to the alternative pattern of development experienced by another or related cultural system.

Co-evolutionary systems can be defined as two or more cultural communities that are overlapping in their adaptive patterns or else are contiguous with one another, but are evolving upon separate but interrelated pathways. They therefore tend to coevolve interdependently, such that changes affecting one will lead to alterations in the other pattern. Coevolutionary development is a selectional concept of eco-cultural systems describing the mutual succession of two interdependent cultural systems. Individuals or subgroups may pass between such systems, and occupy strategic places in relation to both, but the directional pathways of each system is basically different and separate from that of the other.

Techno & Ethno-schismogenesis

Coevolutionary structures lead to what can be referred to as counteradaptational strategies in which the developmental patterns of one group or cultural system may become directly linked to the cultural patterning of another cultural system, or in a more indirect manner involving several cultural systems as intermediates. There can occur as a consequence of this patterning the rise of what might be referred to as cultural schismogenesis, or what Gregory Bateson described as the elaboration of a cultural focus or complex by one group vis-à-vis a similar elaborative patterning of a different but competing group. This process has been documented ethnographically, and it has also been documented historically in reference to both contemporary and ancient societies. We can see this in the "arms race" of the Cold War Era, as well as in the "space race" which competitive challenge spurred both the US and the Soviet Union to accelerate their programs of space exploration far faster than they might otherwise have accomplished.

The general concept of schismogenesis provides us with a competitive framework within which to understand the coevolutionary development and elaboration of certain cultural complexes within a larger regional or interregional context, and provides therefore an alternative basis for understanding one of the possible processes underlying transculturational patterning of civilizational complexes in the past.

If we looked deeper into the past, we might speculate upon a less intense form of cultural schismogenesis, perhaps occurring upon a symbolic and possibly a technological level, that might have led to the formation and maintenance of boundaries between groups, internal social reorganization, and accelerating the cultural intensification of systems vis-à-vis one another within a regional/interregional framework. Much of the appropriation of symbolisms and material artifacts through diffusion and acculturation, what marks a certain event horizon in the archaeological record, may have been attempts of cultural systems in competition with one another not to be one-upped, and to stay ahead of the game that was being played.