Following customs is enforced in each culture through its...

Following customs is enforced in each culture through its own special system of rewarding and punishment. Language and other symbolic tools do play an important role in the transfer of culture between generations, but some kinds of behaviour can be achieved solely by experience. Every society possesses its own specific “cultural basics” which include all organizations necessary to man, e.g.

social organizations, religion, political organizations, economic organizations, and material culture (tools, devices, weapons, clothing, etc.). Sophisticated societies are distinguished from “primitive” ones in the complexity of their cultural bases. However, these two terms must always be considered relatively. Basically, each human community has a definite culture, but in complex societies, secondary cultures can also branch out of its national, social and religious conditions.

On the other hand, peaceful or even hostile cultural contact can lead to common cultures acceptable by various nations -based on the fact that co-culturalism can exist and each side may adopt the other's traditions. The characteristics of a culture may be spread directly or indirectly among its groups. Such a process is called diffusion. A cultural area is a land where some features of a culture are visible.

Various schools of thought have emerged in anthropology attempting to account for how cultures work, develop and spread, but all agree on a vast evolutionary process throughout the history of man, especially in technical and economic domains. However, the evolution has not taken place at the same rate for all nations, and is still incomplete in many of them, although at times co-culturalism can integrate several steps into one.

In the first phase, food-hunting, small groups of nomadic hunters, fishermen and fruit pickers move from one place to another in search of food. They live temporarily in caves or other shelters, as in the lower and middle Stone Age. The next phase is producing food, in which man has learned how to tame animals and use plants. He lives in small settlements, like the upper Stone Age. After that, civil life began, evidence of which can be found in great ancient civilizations.

Categorizing a contemporary culture should not be done solely on the basis of its technical or industrial progress. For example, today's food-hunters, e.g.