A careful definition
The Hypothesis of Convergent Cultural Responses proposes that different human communities, under comparable pressures, may independently arrive at materially similar solutions. Resemblance does not always require contact, diffusion or a single origin.
The book applies this idea to death, memory, territory, loss, altitude and stone. It does not deny cultural diffusion; it resists making diffusion the only possible explanation.
Between two excesses
Against the impulse to imagine a lost transmission behind every resemblance, and against the opposite habit of reducing every resemblance to irrelevance, the hypothesis opens an intermediate space. It asks which human problems generate similar forms when distant societies face comparable pressures.
Status of the hypothesis
The Hypothesis of Convergent Cultural Responses is an interpretive formulation by the author, not a universally accepted theory under that name. It asks a testable question: when societies with no demonstrated contact face comparable constraints or problems — death, memory, defence, orientation, prestige, intergenerational transmission — can partly similar material or symbolic solutions arise without a common origin?
Visual resemblance cannot decide the answer. Convergence is an alternative hypothesis to diffusion, not a licence to ignore historical contact. Where transmission, exchange, migration or cultural kinship is documented, that evidence must be included. Where it is not documented, resemblance alone does not justify inventing a missing channel.
Relation to research on cultural evolution
The book’s hypothesis is not equivalent to cultural attraction theory, but there is a useful intellectual neighbourhood. Contemporary work on cultural attraction studies how cognitive, ecological and social factors can channel cultural transformations towards recurrent forms. The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution presents cultural attraction as a plural framework for relating cultural phenomena to factors of attraction and for explaining stability and change without reducing the process to faithful copying.
That literature does not automatically validate the cases proposed in Altars of the Deluge. It provides theoretical context for a broader intuition: similarity may emerge from shared constraints and repeated transformation as well as from direct transmission.
How a comparison can fail
A comparison weakens when it selects similarities while ignoring functional differences; when chronologies do not overlap plausibly; when a well-documented transmission route makes convergence unnecessary; or when the supposedly shared pressure cannot be demonstrated. It should also be rejected if the category is so broad that almost any human form fits it.
The book therefore applies the idea cautiously to stone, altitude, death and memory. The productive question is not simply “do they look alike?” but what problem each form addressed, what alternatives existed, and what evidence could distinguish independent invention from transmission.
