The increasing complexity of the cultural environment

The concept of “cultural environment” is used usually as an intuitive one and various authors include their own sense in it. It would be useful to try to formulate this concept systematically for the possibility of comparing materials and ideas and for interpreting them. I propose to construct this concept on the basis of a new, multilevel approach to the evolutionary processes. The first step may be by dividing the cultural environment into two parts: the material artefacts (such as nests, burrows, etc. of animals and shelters, tools, graves of humans) and spiritual artefacts (such as the behavioural patterns of animals that are not innate and translated by learning and taboos, traditions, etc. of humans).

The main changes in the cultural environment happened in the spiritual part. The artefacts of it are not saved and that creates a special difficulty and necessity for an interdisciplinary investigation of the problem of man and environment in the Palaeolithic.

The earliest fossil remains of anatomically modern Homo sapiens that can be accurately dated to about 100,000 years ago are from Israel. These early humans had modern supralaryngeal vocal tracts and brain mechanisms that are necessary to produce human speech and syntax. They probably had a language that made use of a complex syntax and reasoning ability. The main complication of the cultural environment during the Palaeolithic was caused by the accumulation of a spiritual construction within certain human societies, improvement of syntax that was possible thanks the usage of language and the origin of specific human altruism, as one pillar of human morality.