An archetype for evolving dynamics of primitive human culture

Abstract

From the very beginning, human civilizations have evolved and spread across the surface of the planet Earth through various dynamical processes such as growth, assimilation, invasion, aggression, and annihilation. Such processes being responsible for expansion, integration, destruction, and reconstruction of civilizations, used to play key roles in the tides of time and fabric today’s multicultural societies. A culture, being an inherent entity of human civilization, also evolves in conformity with civilizations. As such, the evolution of cultures can be understood as an artifact of such dynamical processes. How such dynamical processes initiate the diversification of cultures from small-scale simple societies? Why most of the cultures go extinct and why some survive for a comparatively longer period even after facing several wars and attacks? What plays a key role in creating a multicultural society? In order to partially answer all such highly stimulating questions, here we are interested in tackling the problem by giving importance to the nature of governing dynamical processes. Hence we perform a set of computer simulations on an archetypal model where a large number of independent and isolated primitive human cultures, being distributed randomly in a two-dimensional domain, are allowed to evolve following some historically-inspired rules for expansion, interaction, and merging processes among the cultures. As they evolve through inter-cultural interactions, the surviving cultures dynamically inherit the characteristics of their ancestors, leading to a well-mixed globally-polarise culture that emerges depending on the frequency and casualties of wars, consequences of coalescence, and similarity factors. From the ensuing simulation results, we find in accord with the historical fact that the rich diversity in a surviving culture is a consequence of all the dynamical processes that act repeatedly during its entire evolutionary track. We also visualize through our model how a global monocultural state and colonization among multicultural societies emerge separately in the modern period. We highlight a number of possible avenues for future research along these lines.