Trans-cultural Diffusion - Theories

Theories

The many models that have been proposed for inter-cultural diffusion are

• Hyperdiffusionism —the theory that all cultures originated from one culture.
• Culture circles diffusionism (Kulturkreise)—the theory that cultures originated from a small number of cultures.
• Evolutionary diffusionism—the theory that societies are influenced by others and that all humans share psychological traits that make them equally likely to innovate, resulting in development of similar innovations in isolation.
• Mallory's "Kulturkugel" (a German compound meaning "culture bullet", coined by Mallory himself), a term suggested by J. P. Mallory to model the scale of invasion vs. gradual migration vs. diffusion. According to this model, local continuity of material culture and social organization is stronger than linguistic continuity, so that cultural contact or limited migration regularly leads to linguistic changes without affecting material culture or social organization.

A concept that has often been mentioned in this regard, which may be framed in the evolutionary diffusionism model, is that of "an idea whose time has come" — whereby a new cultural item appears almost simultaneously and independently in several widely separated places, after certain prerequisite items have diffused across the respective communities. This concept has been invoked, for example, with regard to the development of calculus by Newton and Leibnitz, or the inventions of the airplane and of the electronic computer.