protocultures

Noun

protoculture (plural protocultures)

1. A base or root culture that serves as the basis for later distinct recognised cultural traditions.
   • [W]e may reconstruct the protoculture by the same methods as the protolanguage—namely, comparison of extant descendants.2025 December 12, Tom Hercules Davies, “Horses, Wheels, Languages: Greek, Mesopotamian and Indic Epic on the Eurasian Steppe”, in The Classical Quarterly, volume 75, number 1, page 9
2. (physical) 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.
   • 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.1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 67