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. physicalanthropologyThe 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