protoculture

English[edit]

protoculture (plural protocultures)

(physical anthropology) The passing of behaviours from one generation to another among non-human primates. These cultures are very rudimentary, and do not exhibit complex cultural technology.
- 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 67:
  Life in this primitive condition of nature is not, in the words of Hobbes, "nasty, brutish, and short"; it is a world of rules, a world in which physical aggression and sexuality are shaped by a protoculture.