What would a culture created by a non-communal, incredibly solitary race look like...

Generally speaking you need a community to kick start brain development, absolutely need one for learning.

So I'm mostly wondering how this solitary race even came to sapience. Oh wait, god did it. Probably as a joke. So no.

>Generally speaking you need a community to kick start brain development, absolutely need one for learning.

What about octopuses?

They wouldn't

No proper culture aside from a more or less shared set of personality traits among all of them, and maybe an unspoken religion, passed down from parents to children rather than properly given service. Verbal communication would be simple but enough to get their point across. Probably either very nomadic or very "get the fuck off my lawn" sorts of people. Parents would likely split up after the child was raised to young adulthood, or at least strong enough to kill things and eat on its own without their help.

Not entirely related, but this concept reminds me of "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost. Give it a read.

Make the race gather at very long intervals, like at change of season, or during specific yearly moments. they metamorph into social creatures only for the sake of mating and exchanging what they gathered throughout the year or season.

Highly ritualized social interactions, dictated by some increasingly absurd conformist requirements.

For example: suppose two had to meet in order to discuss... I don't know, Catan. Trading Wood for Sheep?

The shepherd would be watching over his flock, when the woodcutter approached.
Both would perform an elaborate gesture that would indicate "while I am extremely dangerous, I am not going to hurt you / let you hurt me, and I want to be ambiguous about our respective strengths, but I want what you have, and am willing to offer what I have e for what you have".
Such a dance / call - and - response, and the following negotiation would take an unsatisfactory amount of time to complete.

Octopi *are* a community. Eight tentacles, one dome.Look at their nervous system's distribution!

You could have the weak of the species end up nomadic, trading tools and knowledge for safe passage through already claimed territory. Maybe have a subspecies that is smarter but far weaker, that travel around and give things to the stronger for protection for a certain amount of time, most likely the time it takes to get from one end of the territory to the other. Idk, you'd have to do some stretching (more so that usual anyway) to make it work, since a species like that wouldn't have the chance to progress much.

>Pictographs/Hieroglyphics
Make the species nomadic, and base their written language on pic related.
>The species follows a philosophy of helping others, so they leave signs on rocks and trees to indicate danger, claimed territory, plentiful resources, safe places, etc..
>Members of the species enjoy creating names for themselves, and signing their names to indicate where they have been.
>A strict code of honor prohibits lying, so signs are always trusted, and often corrected if found to be wrong. This leads to a culture where writing is a collaborative process rather than a solitary one.
>Naturally, the images would start as simple pictographs but eventually evolve into a system not unlike kanji or heiroglyphics.
>Once a language is adopted, stories, maps, schedules, legends, and even religions can be written and formed collaboratively.
>Important places include caves with thousands of "X rested here" names written on the walls, groves of trees with lengthy legends wrapping around their trunks, and boulders with maps or calendars carved into them.
tl;dr the nomadic civilization trades knowledge via bathroom wall writing.

What happens when they run into each other, say two different ones want to use the same cave for the night?

>it's
its, you retard

Except those societies are made by incredibly social animals, humans.

Or is this some meme I'm unaware of?

Territorial dispute. The loser can then offer food to the winner for the chance to still stay

I like it. Not sure if this would be playable, but I like it. At least as a NPC.

Dragons?

Nordics personal space and emotional communication can be... well, interesting to witness in the rural parts of these countries, so to speak.

I'd presume that they'd have a concept of mutually-assured destruction, so they'd avoid fighting.
>In the wilderness with nobody to look after you, injury often means certain death since it hampers your ability to gather food.
>In a lethal fight with weapons, both combatants are likely to be hurt, even the winner of a fight.
>Members of the species realize this, and use "mutual intimidation" to ensure that they don't just go killing each other over stupid shit like private caves.
Of course, that's assuming that they'd be threatened by injury. If we're talking about a species with, say, regeneration, then fights would happen all the damn time.

Maybe the exchange of threats can develop into a sort of ritual
>When two individuals meet by chance, several rules govern their interaction
>Basically, it boils down to the two talking about what they'd do if the other attacked them
>The "ritual" differs depending on the situation and the physical state of both parties, and usually individuals will put their own unique spin on the threats
>Once the threatening is done and both parties "realize" where they stand, they make peace, but never really drop their guard
Even after this ritual is done, the two continue to try and impress/intimidate each other by demonstrating their craftsmanship and skill. This often results in both parties learning something new, since members of the species enjoy demonstrating their knowledge by helping or teaching each other (similar to why they enjoy leaving hobo signs for each other). A meeting may result in learning new crafting techniques, survival skills, combat maneuvers, recipes, or even stories and songs.

Also
>Three-way meetings are considered bad luck because the typical mutually-assured destruction rules are thrown off, so a third individual coming across another two will usually leave without sharing words
>Because of this, and the fact that mothers raise their young, meeting a mother and her child is considered bad luck.

I could imagine this causing some misunderstandings with any human hunters they find. See a hunter who has taken shelter in a cave, walk inside to share it, and then it assumes he won because the human went really pale at the first threat

Depending on how strong/ well equipped the thing is, I imagine they might just kill the human hunter, especially if its, say, somthing like OP's pic

Cephalopods are a good start, octopi are undoubtedly smart, having developed complex sight, some degree of communication and and extremely competent problem solving.

A good point to make is that, even the most solitary of gendered animals need to find a mate to reproduce with. Some of then even rearing the young, so communication might develop from this instinctual necessity to procreate.

Once you have communication, depending on the species approach to territory, say, if the mark or not, they could develop communication to interact with other non-potential-mates from their own species to avoid conflict or reach agreements.

Seems very unlikely, though, for any sufficiently large, sentient species, to not require some degree of communal interactions because they'd need impossibly large ranges for each individual to be self sufficient on its own space, to the point where gene migration could be a serious problem.

Even if octopi were as intelligent as humans, every single octopus would need to discover everything on its own, if it's bound to never rely on another octopus for it. with no familiar links to propagate knowledge at the very least, all of that biological effort to develop a large enough brain for abstract thought would be mostly to waste, as it then becomes increasingly more efficient to develop communities out of it.

For a fantastical setting, I'd say it's more likely for a species to develop naturally, with some sort of communal/cultural unit, and then for cultural reasons the groups dissolve. A great betrayal or catastrophe forcing a return to basics, in a short amount of time before their tuned-for-solitary-life tools disappeared by natural selection.

I think if we're going realistic we should definitely base things around reproduction first.

A few base characteristics of our animal:

>predator
>needs a lot of food, more than a human, less than a tiger
>have hands or at least some tool-manipulator

Let's say that an ancestor species develops a sex drive. Then eventually the animals get to dolphin/octopus level intelligence, and they start having sex for fun.

This means they have a reason to stick around with partners. Also, helping raise the young.

But how do they become solitary again for our purposes?

Let's say the young have prolonged childhood and adolescence, like humans. As such, they have a larger brain size and are more clever overall. However, in a bodily sense the young can survive on their own after a few months or years. So its their brains that are taking a long time to develop.

It becomes inefficient for family groups to hunt in the same area, so an instinct evolves that makes individuals want to leave and go off in their own area for a while.

Driven together by sex drive, forced apart by food supply. Temporary small family communities and large brains leads to communication.

Common language is the next issue. IDK how to tackle that.

This is extremely good, especially regarding OPs pic, as tigers sort of do this as it is.

I would say for a solitary species, you would get written word before spoken. Animals already leave claw marks on trees to designate territory. It would not take much of a stretch to see animals making more unique marks to signal the specific creature whose territory it is, or leaving marks for other things, like places considered to be neutral territory.

Family-tribalism solves the language problem to a degree.
The species as a whole won't have a universal language, but in a given area they will, and likely all be loosely related. Things get kind of weird on the periphery of the territory though, as different tribes intermingle as do their language, creating transition pidgin or creole languages between territories.

>you would get written word before spoken
if anything you'd get biological languages before either of those. claw marks are just a tiny bit of the information relayed by chemical and hormonal markings.

which leads to the point where, you don't really need written or spoken language at all, you just need a consistent communication system and plenty of solitary animals have those already. be it chemical markings or pulsating flashes of color.

The written language would get passed around more easily than the spoken, no? I write my territory marking on that tree; you write yours; we eventually develop a basic communication system between our local families; I use "loan words" from your writing in my writing when I talk to the guys on the other side of the valley; soon enough we know that others exist, we meet only rarely (and like to keep it that way), and we all share the same or similar writing system.

How deadly is the local environment? Are our tiger-men the apex predators, or just smart enough to stay out of trouble? And what exactly do they eat?

Yeah, but these guys got big brains. They start out by trying to communicate more complex ideas and information, and that forces a more detailed basic language to develop.

I think you would still get written symbols. After all, there are some materials you can't claw into, and chiseling a sign into a rock might be better in some cases. It also allows for more complex signals than 'X was here' to be communicated.

You could do it like wolves do.

>Family unit has offspring.
>Young members of pack reach puberty, go off alone into the wilderness.
>Eventually find a mate, start new pack.

Eliminate the pack part and you have a species that rears its young together in a family unit, that then disolves upon maturation.

I kind of feel like more animals do this already, but I'm not sure off the top of my head. Leopards maybe?

Octopuses are an anomaly, to be sure, but recent findings show that the higher cephalopods alter and refine their own genes through RNA editing, including regular alterations to the genes that form nerve cells. It isn't for sure, but it seems likely that they are literally reprogramming themselves to become more intelligent. Truly, they are protean nightmares.

I mean, chemical markings can and do communicate complex ideas, ant's can relay coordinates, calculate area and stuff like that with no 'written' or 'spoken' language and we only speak because our anatomy allows us to generate the complex sounds we do, so humans undoubtedly vocalized and used corporal gestures way earlier than written language appeared.

I'm just trying to stay away from our horrible instinct to anthropomorphize everything for lack of creativity or what not.

For the exclusive case of big cat people, we know for a fact that big cats use hormonal markings and vocalizations for communication, so assuming anything else would take priority is silly.

From a strictly biological perspective, big cat people could develop higher intelligence very differently from our general understanding of intelligence, and they could do this without tool manipulation, but evolving tool manipulation is a huge investment when your apex predator lifestyle only cares about stamina, energy efficiency and stuff.

So at this point our options are pretty much magic out of our asses or a total restructuring of our understanding of the evolution of higher intelligences.

Well, we could make them based on a more fantastic species, like Griffons or owlbears. Something that mixes a large predator with something avian. A beak or talons could allow for a degree of motor skill that paws would not.

I think your right on the written language part, but going full picture-writing, I would ave their language be non-phonetic, so ys written communication is fairly easy, but spoken communication is hard, and very rare.
I'm thinking highly literate, nearly mute tiger-men. Maybe it's even taboo to speak to someone outside your family.

as for other questions: Tiger-men are basically humans but bigger and fiercer. So nearly apex predators. Maybe the odd bear or large beast might compete with them for resources, but nothing really preys on them. What do they eat: meat. They are still obligate carnivores. They generally don't prey on sentient beings, but are not opposed to eating the remains of people they killed in combat. Local environment: kill-or-be-killed, everything is deadly, and competition for food is fierce.

we now know that most cephalopods have some degree of higher intelligent functions, I wouldn't say it's an anomaly. if there's a resource to be exploited or a niche to be filled, nature always find the better way to exploit and fill it.

living in the vast fucking ocean is pretty terrifying with a body as soft as an octopus' and nature proved the extra mobility was worth more than the load of an external shell, now it's proving that the extra cunning is worth more than the bigger sizes or stuff like that.

i'm just saying that the artistic liberties required to justify such a creature would let you hand-wave all their cultural paradoxes as well.

going by the stuff here , such a collective of creatures wouldn't have ever develop agriculture, as they could not survive on it as a primary produce, so domestication of livestock would've been very hard if not outright impossible.
without agriculture, they would either need HUGE ranges (that they couldn't strictly enforce) to survive out of huntable wildlife, or to be outright obligate nomadic. also their numbers would be quite low as specialization of labor would be very hard without a consistent source of food, especially one that isn't energy intensive (like hunting) because most if not every member of the familial groups would need to spend resources to procure food.

humans only made it so far because they could eat a whole fucking lot of food groups, especially ones that could be stored after gathered. so if our tigermen can only eat meat, they need some way to preserve it and procure it in large scales (not easy, we managed only very recently) which i guess involves either mining (and all the technology and industrial procedures backing it) or living in a cold enough environment.

most of these things are obviously possible and i can't claim to be a master on the subject, but it all paints a very difficult picture in the realm of biologics, for which its-just-lolmagic would suffice.

Cats also use visual markings and displays for communications as well, so them having a basic written language isn't a huge leap, especially if we assume they are in a world with humans or another species that does have written language. It may not arise naturally, but surely they would pick it up for it's obvious utility, plus unless they are completely hostile to other species, they would likely have use it for trading or communicating with other species.

That being said, yes cat intelligence would almost certainly be quite alien to us. They don't think like us, and their isn't reason to believe they ever would. Their processes and priorities would be vastly different.

Perhaps nomadic omnivores. Following the herds, who follow the plants, which could follow the predator-prey cycles (as herbivores get eaten, plant life comes back, tiger dudes eat that instead and their population grows).

I would say having them living somewhere cold would make the most sense. Something where there's lots of forests and undergrowth for large game, but stays cold for much of the year.

If I were to default to magic, I would say the ability to breath fire or some sort of fine-manipulation spell would be a large boon, although that would go for most any type of animal.

I don't imagine they would be a particularly advanced culture, but they could potentially thrive as northern barbarians.

Eh it's not that hard to justify. You just can't expect a whole lot of versatility our familiarity.

Cold environment is easiest to go with. Our tigermen can come from and live only in the far north, almost entirely nomadic. They have typical mother-cub tribal system, with males leaving earlier than females to carve out territory, and females living in a large but loosely connected continuous territory. Young males will likely make small packs in early life and form similar... confederacies for lack of a better word. Bearing in mind tigers already do this, all we're adding is upright posture and sentience.

Specialization of labour is an insurmountable problem, but acquiring the products of it is not. Maybe they just raid more settled peoples for their goods.

Honestly if you just make them barely social with each other, and out-right hostile to anything they can kill, they can work as nomadic barbarians pretty easy, without loosing too much of their tigerness.

yeah, i'm not saying it's impossible for them to have written language, but it doesn't look like a priority for them in my mind.

you could even argue that written language was a direct consequence of wanting to safekeep commercial transactions and/or property, so for a primarily nomadic species with no sense of produce and/or property, written language would be strictly cultural/religious in tone.

for cat people, i imagine a lot of physical gesturing, chemical markers and simpler vocalizations would be the bulk of their communications, with weird efforts to externally communicate to other intelligent species.

yeah, this seems like the most reasonable compromise but it puts them at perilous spot were real tigers are, where they are impossibly dependent on their habitat's carrying capacity and large confrontations with humans would be catastrophic for their survival.

you just can't reasonably feed a large group of upright tigers with a more energy intensive brain for long without either exterminating their local prey or forcing them out of their land and into conflict with species that can outproduce their weight in food by the millions.

I think at that point though, we're less running into problems with a realistic solitary race, and more the issues with an obligate carnivore one.

I think that if these tigers could supplement their diet with even a single form of plant that could be cultivated (and ideally stored), that would solve a lot of their problems.

One thing that does spring to mind is the idea of a generational species, like whatever the fuck Zoidberg is in Futurama.

As mentioned above, communication for the purposes of trade and mutualism (IE marking local resources) is great, but I maintain it would ultimately incentivise closer and closer interactons until your society of loners... aren't so lonesome anymore.

In a generational species of solitary hunters, the evolutionary incentive for communication is to leave evidence of their existence, and lessons in their environment, so that their offspring, who will follow, and probably live in the same area as them, will inherit their legacy and not have to re-learn literally everything. The nature of such a language is difficult to envision, but probably would stay at the pictograph stage, never evolving to hieroglyphs, and just become increasingly detailed and animatic pictographs.

Each new generation is then functionally a race to re-absorb their ancestral culture and technology in order to dominate rival territories with the advantage that gives them. Children are selected to RAPIDLY absorb written and abstractly presented information, ironically making them very able to read lies and emotion off the faces of other species, and possibly even learn other written languages. They'd be a race of mad inventors and contraptionists, but also artists, each child hatching into a life or death struggle with its siblings to lay claim to the workshop of their ancestors, and then wasting no time in utilising that workshop to create deadly weapons with which to lay claim to more resources at the fringes of their territories, in order to build more contraptions into their workshop.

Traders from other species might be accepted because they offer a way to get resources unavailable within their own territory, and trading with them rather than just killing them for their wares is preferable because it means that the relationship with those traders can become more inheritance.

Then their population stays small.

Or no humans. I mean, you're using this for a campaign setting, but it'd be sort of cool to play in a world with such a minimal tribal civilization.

True, but you have to have some suspension of disbelief. You can also keep stretching the justifications. Perhaps these tigermen live on a separate northern continent. they live more or less in sync with the predator-prey cycle as mentioned earlier, and they have avoided exterminations, because invading their homeland would require a huge expedition to conquer a mostly worthless almost entirely un-arable land.

Honestly, since I like my beast races to be more beasty as opposed to just re-skinned humans with quirks, I'm not opposed to a bit of lolmagic.

This is... pretty good.

the problem i see here is getting to this point, and it's something at what many sci-fi writers fail (at least imho). we as writers know exactly what we want and how it is supposed to work, but most don't stop to consider how could this scenario be possible at all.

it isn't like mutualism is totally alien for living species in earth, but most organism evolve with the want for their own offspring (actually just genetic material) to survive and keep on existing. most living species of animal will outright kill the offspring of other members of its own species and shit like that, specially for solitary species.

but even that aside, the idea of leaving behind all the tools and knowledge for the next generations without prior generation's intervention (if i'm reading this right) is kind of evolutionarily bonkers. smart individuals would recognize that they can avoid the energetic investment in creating information by just producing more offspring, and out compete those that invest the resources in that. so one generation could be very successful just for it to go extinct on the following one, it's way too much variability.

offspring finely tuned to absorb might not be finely tuned to produce and vice versa, and having to sets of genes (environmental triggers?) for each stage of the generational species is again, extra energetic expenditure for cases that an individual might not even know it will ever need. so one individual that isn't carrying the generational schematics could outcome those that do, and revert back to non-generational individuals with time.

i don't know, really, the idea is pretty interesting regardless, but more for the realm of fantasy than strict sci-fi/biology.

i think there was a worldbuilding thread in the long forgotten days of Veeky Forums that featured Cephalopods as cosmic horrors that threatened to devour the world, and only the whales, Dolphins, and other sea life could oppose them. it was amazing.

you should find this for me, i require it for research purposes...

Consider that in a competitive, solitary species, competition among offspring will wittle down the brood to the same number of eventual successors whether you start with 6 offspring or 1000. Therefore, the most energetically favourable strategy may well be to simply invest in increasing the quality of the survivors so that they are capable of invading and monopolising the territory of rival bloodlines.

Evolutionary, I'm assuming we're starting with an intelligent, short lived, tool using species, which are principle qualities we would think of a cephalopod as having, comparatively. It is perfectly possible for such a behaviour to evolve naturally. IE the parent makes no special effort to destroy the tools that they found useful in their life, the offspring who arrive after their death apply enough critical thought to realise these strangely shaped rocks and sticks would be really good at the thing that their ancestor specifically crafted them to do, suddenly the parent has, from the grave, saved their offspring weeks worth of effort in tool construction.

The biggest leap in the process is for the parent having an incentive to provide instruction for their offspring, in turn requiring a cognitive understanding of their own impending death, and the role of life in the universe, that we would typically not ascribe to animals which have not had time to develop a rich language.

That said, evolution may just simply provide this. Parents who, in their dying throes, lay their tools out in a way that makes their use easier to understand, will experience greater fecundity through their offspring, and so any gene-linked mental variations that arise through chance to support such behaviours will be amplified. It might be that until their language and cognition evolves significantly, they don't ultimately understand why they are spending all of their rest time drawing a painstakingly accurate technical drawing of how to use a bow and arrow, they just like doing it.

it is worth pointing out that octopi do understand the concept of teaching and being tought. but this is becouse we tought them first

>Would they even be able to create a culture/civilization if there was some instinct telling them to stay alone?
No. Quite simply intelligence and culture come about because of sociality. This is massively evident in all the intelligence tests of various animals. The highest scoring animals in intelligence are all ones that engage in high social activity, as brain power needs to be used to account for where on the social ladder the various other members of your clan are.

Some good examples: Whose smarter, the wolf who lives in a simple family group or the Spotted Hyena who lives in large social groups that have smaller hunting groups within it? Spotted Hyenas. They score higher on every metric of intelligence when compared to wolves, and interestingly outscore chimps on cooperation puzzles. They actually alter their social behavior to accomplish this, something that us humans do when trying to get people to work together, and which chimps and many other animals have a hard time doing.

Of course you need something to help coordinate clan members in a quick way with distinct signatures, such as for hunting or territory defense, which sound works nicely for. From this you eventually get unique sound signatures that convey meaning, basically language. Social activity drives language creation, which tool use can drive further, which creates a nice feedback loop of increasing social activity, tool, and language use, which eventually give rise to something like us.

If you want a race or culture of loners, you're going to need a great deal of magic or hand waving to make it work, and it's going to fall apart on any close inspection.

Octopi can be trained much like any other animal of sufficient intelligence. They otherwise don't pass on this training to others. And their supposed observational intelligence, where they learn by observing instead of being taught, is highly disputed.

>They score higher on every metric of intelligence

That makes me wonder. Isn't it possible that social animals score higher on human-designed intelligence tests, because we are social animals and therefore see such social skill as a greater sign of intelligence?

I mean, obviously a species that is more solitary is going to be fucking terrible at 'cooperation puzzles'

Maybe. But it's also things like mirror tests which have nothing to do with social activity. Or solitary puzzles. Scientists like to try to remove as much bias from their tests as possible.

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/19168394
Here you go user. Enjoy.

It wouldn't happen. There's nothing that would justify a solitary race creating anything that resembles an empire minus a very broad family tree.

Who said an Empire? OP said a culture or civilization.

Culture yes, civ no.

I think we've addressed the question of possibility by this point, the answer being "sort of." Semi-solitary nomadic individuals that tend to live alone but near their family groups, moving nomadically in cycles through a forest/tundra environment, following the prey animals and plants.

They communicate mostly with pheromones and body language among their family, with some rudimentary vocalizations.

They have a written language that is becoming more universal among different families as they use it to communicate territory and set up meetings to trade for things.

So now we deal with What happens next? What's their culture like? Do they start to develop religion? Poetry, stories? Do they write down more complex ideas to share with their families, or do they develop local spoken languages?

As an aside, I have to say this has been a really cool excercise,
with a surprisingly high level of discourse given we're on Veeky Forums.

Almost all nomadic cultures tend to have story-telling, at least in family units, so I don't think these would be too different-- albeit, the stories would be less tales of morality, and probably more practical.

Also, not sure if religion would suit them, considering that nothing larger than family units crop up. Maybe something like believing in the spirit of the land and the animals, but not much more, considering that they don't seem to be the types to take a chunk of their time and devote it solely to worship.

Hmm. Maybe similar to household gods, they'd have personal spirits. Basically a personification of all the little things they've noticed or superstitions they've developed. It could also be a way of depersonalizing things so that information can be exchanged without starting a dominance conflict if two people disagree about some detail. Neither is wrong, and neither is trying to asset that the other one is, they each simply haven't met the right spirit or ghost.

Yeah, animism and the like seems like it could be common, though I don't think they would really proceed to a full civilization.

That's more due to the fact that a civilization implies a lot of buildings, cities, and other things that don't really fit with a nomadic lifestyle, let alone such a solitary one.

Perhaps an exterior threat could pose enough of a danger that they may need to have a bit more coordination, though it can't really unify them fully or you lose the whole solitary angle.

Octopodes

It's a Greek root word, not a Latin one

That would never happen. Complex social interactions are one of the most necessary factors in developing advanced intelligence. The less social an animal is, the less it needs to communicate, and the less it communicates, the less it develops its intelligence.

So, a "non-communal" race would never be intelligent or social enough to create anything complex enough to be considered a culture to begin with.

I imagine the core of their society would be libraries.

They'd have neutral paths running through their territories, allowing access to libraries. Libraries are like the least-social aspect of society that can allow the creation of a culture/civilization.

I imagine their society grew really slow up until they invent networked computers.

While it is true that complex social interactions provide a strong selective pressure for intelligence, to say you absolutely could not develop intelligence without them goes too far. For example, on a planet with erratic weather you could have the rapidly changing environment select for intelligence without sociality.

I feel like that ties back to their issues with proceeding past a hunter/gatherer nomad stage though. Getting a printing press would be difficult, so any words would have to be tablets. And then it's a matter of specialization of labor.

It could be interesting if as a cultural/religious thing, they each decided to etch a tablet with their name and some wisdom they'd want to pass on, and bring that to some central mountain in their lands where others had placed theirs.

That could give them a bit more semblance of a civilization, since there would be safer trails that led towards such a central point, as well as it being a more frequent meeting place for trade or other such things. Still not bustling enough to be a city, but you'd likely find people camped out nearby to wait their turn at the library without talking to anyone. Or perhaps the library itself is considered a sacred place, avoiding the bad omens of more than 3 meeting, but only so long as everyone ignores eachother, save for maybe a shaman that oversees the place.

I know we are being semi serious here, but this form of conversation doubling as a method of exchanging information is pretty funny.

>"My sword made of steel folded a 100 times will cut through your armor and your body, and you'll drop dead in two pieces!"
>"Ah, but my armor is made of the hide of the stonephant, is hard as rock, and should you strike, your weapon will break and I'll pummel you to dust with my dragon-tusk club"
>"... Wait, you managed to make an armor out of stone-hide? How?"
>"Pretty easy, you just need to let it soak in urine and then use a heated knife to cut it to size..."
>""Urine and heated knife, gotcha... Where were we? Oh, right *khm* Your armor is mighty, but I have darts coated in Coatl poison that I extracted and distilled using a series of glass tubes!"
>"... male or female coatl?"
>"I prefer male but..."

etc.

Love it.

Anyway just want to point out, as I am pro-tigermen, many species of cats form social groups of varying types and sophistication. Lions, leopards, tigers and cheetahs all form packs/prides/social groups. Lions are obvious, they form prides, and cheetahs I think everyone knows about how they make small usually unrelated social groups, especially when they are young. Leopards I know have been known to be social, and tigers are interesting, they tend to form overlapping territory rings and while preferring to be alone, do tolerate other tigers in their range, and also are known to have communal areas, usually around water.
So while mostly loner, they do have the ability to also make small groups already.

>an entire society of those kids who interact entirely through texting

... anonymously?

To drive home the idea of them being solitary, you could turn groups into temporary social "contracts".

Imagine for example, a big herbivore migratory event. During this time, all social rules are uplifted to allow everyone a good chance at getting some food through cooperation as long as the migration lasts.

Hell, combine it with the libraries idea to create a two-pronged start for civilization. Once a year during the herbivore rush, the anti-socials start acting social to claim as much food before the dry season starts. Over time, this period isn't just about hunting food, but also about the transmission of information about hunting, trapping, butchering, cooking and the making of weapons and tools.

100,000 years later, and the mountain that overlooks the river that the herbivores cross in their trek houses a fuckhuge library of knowledge, partially practical information, partially historical data ("I am Wakuz, slayer of 30 elephants."), partially religious/cultural information like poetic texts written to an anthropomorphized spirit of the Hunt. The library could be a tablet storage, or maybe just rock carvings/paintings covering caves and walls.

There is still scholarly debate as to which way around this relationship works. Some argue that brains grow as a result of larger societies, other's argue that societies grow as a result of larger brains. Most recognise it's likely some combination of the two, but we're far from a concensus on the issue.

"Culture" is an inherently communal and social thing. Most likely, individuals of a race of solitary sapients would be extremely distinct from eachother, with the exception that they'd most likely all be distrustful/hostile to some degree, simply because they would have to be in order to have survived on their own for so long.

What about huge caves/cliff faces carved with pictographs/hieroglyphs/lithographs and full scale manuals. With the intimidation and boasting, I imagine it would be structured like youtube exercise videos.

>The first picture is a full body portrait of the autor at it's prime with an introduction.
>I, Wakuz, slayer of 30 elephants, am going to show you how to exploit the weaknesses on the herd's rush to cause them to trample each other!
>The rest is a step by step manual with commentary.

No, I mean they'll talk aloud when they're with each other alone, but in the company of outsiders [adults] they just text each other.

>Be sure to mark your territory here, and share this location with your kin
>look for this marking for more of my glory *distinctive mark*

bless you

>en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus#Usage_notes

interesting

Im stealing a ton of ideas for a race in a novel im writing. How may things change for a sentient race of omniverous, solitary desert insects? They are a little like beetles, but have two long manipulators sprouting from the backs of their head.

Dwelling in a desert makes the use of tools and the storage of food much more difficult overall. Food would also be more relatively scarce compared to the forest we've been assuming, even being omnivorous. Agricultue becomes more viable for them, but you would still have to irrigate plants near some sort of river. However, water sources as a whole would have a sort of mutual understanding surrounding them, due to the relative scarcity, so I'm not sure one bug could even claim a large enough area for farming like that.

Probably a lot of weird traditions involving "respect" being shown by maintaining physical distance, lack of eye-contact, etc...

The more "above" you the individual is in the societies class structure, the more distance you keep, the less eye contact you make, sort of like the chinese tradition of kowtowing: the mosre respected the person, the lower you bow.

>The loser can then offer food to the winner for the chance to still stay
I doubt that would work, if they're a solitary species, unless the winner happens to be looking for a mate and the loser meets their criteria

Maybe in the more primitive age of the race but later on trading for passage/a place to rest for a day or two makes sense.

re: agriculture they could probably become shepards of pigs or sheep, rather than keeping them penned in they'd follow the herd around and keep it safe from other predators so they can keep it for themselves.

I figured that would happen in the case of a storm or severe weather that would make it absolutely unsafe to be outside. At that point, one might tolerate the other more easily since they both know the outside is certain death

>The explanation why octopodes is correct is right there. I'm black and white.
So far so good.

>The dictionaries disagree on the plural.
Weird

>Only one dictionary even mentions octopodes.
>It lists it as uncommon and unusual.
>Another says "only Octopuses" is acceptable
What the fuck is this I'm I reading!?

This is terrible. Next I'll hear someone has decided "double negative for emphasis" isn't wrong in English.

Continuing this train of thought, over time you could even end up with a symbiotic relationship where the herd animals get protection from a smarter stronger critter and the predator gets food, mainly only taking older or weak animals from the herd. You'd potentially get some kind of wierd-ass sheep based ANCAP proto society.

They'd be picked apart by any society that communicated, cooperated and developed together. Sharing space and safely competing/engaging in rivalry is what drives progress. What you're describing is not something that could survive in the face of an expanding civilization.

Humanity got its shit together when they started settling in a single place, and generating resources based centrally on that location. Your OP image essentially describes the extent that non-communal "civilizations" can hope to achieve without intellect superior to BC humans.

>We evolved on a hostile world, the descendants of solitary hunters.
>In a world where one species is the dominant killer
>one's only threat is one's brother, one's sister, anyone of one's species.
>Civilization did not come easily to us, we earned it.
>We mastered our hatreds and murderous desires to form a mighty culture.