Lietuvos istorijos institutas

The aim of this contribution is to explore Julian Ochorowicz’s theory of rudimentary symptoms, a proposition largely based on psychological concepts, balancing between the latest findings in evolutionary biology and anthropology, and exploring the development of man and his history. This concept sought to align the reflection of human nature and culture by introducing a psychological input (the concept of subliminal traditions). The author analyses and reintroduces this concept, somewhat forgotten by researchers, that may have functioned as a bridge, both between evolutionary biology and anthropology, and Polish and West European scientific thought at that time.

The Sub-Neolithic hunter-gatherer-fisher (HGF) groups and Corded Ware (CW) agro-pastoral group interactions within the Lithuanian portion of the Neman Basin around ~3000 BC did not follow the same patterns of agriculturalisation seen elsewhere in Europe during Neolithization. The variation of interaction in this agricultural frontier zone provides valuable insight into the way information exchange between groups drives the exchange of intercultural information and how information exchange between groups ultimately the adaptive morphogenesis of culture. This article’s primary author has already studied this outlier behaviour and the Unified Agricultural Frontier Model (UAFM) was proposed in volume 45 of this journal (Troskosky et al. 2019). The article presented in this volume is a companion piece to the 2019 publication which further explains and tests the mechanics underlying the UAFM. The UAFM applies self-organised criticality (SOC) to the hypothesis that marked cultural shifts are most likely to occur in response to increased levels of stress affect within a society. Stress affect is defined as the dissonance between encultured expectations of reality and phenomenologically lived reality within a population. To test this hypothesis, The Arithmetic Logarithm Illustrating Cultural Exchange (ALICE) model was developed; it provides confirmation that information exchange drives the behaviour of the UAFM across frontier zones. This model provides strong computational confirmation that information drives the behaviour of the UAFM across frontier zones. Theoretically, ALICE supports a general model for information flow between different cultures, facilitating corresponding cultural changes across any frontier. It models how increased levels of stress affect within interacting groups can lead to shifts of societal behaviour marked by a pattern of periods of equilibrium alternating