[Return just the main response. Take out the pre-text and the post-text]

Summarize

"Society
The original set of To'ul'h societies has an extraordinary depth of history, and was arguably much more diverse than that of Old Earth. Advances comparable to writing, the wheel, and agriculture were achieved tens of thousands of years before the first human civilization. Though no one To'ul'h culture lasted more than eight or nine thousand years, there are beliefs, technologies, traditions, and even the equivalent of written records dating back as far as 70,000 years BT. Though they never developed an Industrial age, the To'ul'h in the settled regions of their planet were heirs to a culture more sophisticated and ancient than anything experienced by Old Earth humans before the advent of interplanetary technologies. Even tribes living the simplest and most primitive material lives had a sense of continuity with ancient events. The resulting diversity is impossible to describe in anything but the most general terms.

Because of unique factors in To'ul'h history, philosophies emphasizing balance and harmony tended to predominate over more aggressive change-based schools of thought, but To'ul'h nature is remarkably similar to human nature and had a startlingly similar set of expressions. It is safe to say that nearly any school of thought or belief ever conceived of by humans up to the end of the Interplanetary Age had its expression somewhere on To'ul'h Prime, sometimes more than once. Terragen Humanists, Christians, Marxists, Taoists, Capitalists, Etodists, Neoplatonists, Confucians, Fascists, Hindus, Negentropists, Stoics, and many other groups have all have their cognates somewhere on To'ul'h Prime, either among To'ul'h Prime's living cultures or somewhere in the planet's long history. The subtle differences and the eerie similarities between To'ul'h philosophies, religions, political movements and their Terragen equivalents have quite understandably been a continuing source of interest to scholars, and a continuing source of wonder, revulsion, amusement, or controversy among partisans of these belief systems.

To'ul'h music and art has been profoundly influenced by their dependence on sound over sight. A development particular to the To'ul'h is polmusic, a combination of politics, poetry, music, logic, and rhetoric. One needs to be a To'ul'h to experience its full persuasive force, though some Terragens (notably some sophonts of cetacean ancestry) claim to have a grasp of its essentials. Ancestral polmusic disciplines were widespread and ancient on To'ul'h Prime itself, but it reached its fullest development after Terragen contact in the Ho'mth'u culture in the Morogai system in the late 35th century. It has since become an essential element of To'ul'h and post-To'ul'h culture.

Another unique aspect of ancient To'ul'h culture, still a metaphor in some traditional religions, is ritual cannibalism. In many of the older and denser agricultural centres, animal flesh was a rare commodity. Like humans, baseline To'ul'hs are omnivores, and require either some meat or a careful balance of other foods for optimum health. In many parts of the planet, and especially in the cultures of the Narrow Seas region, this led to ritual consumption of the dead by the kin of the deceased. The echoes of those practices are still strong in baseline and nearbaseline To'ul'hs whose cultures are descended from those of the great cities of the homeworld, though of course, in the millennia since, many To'ul'h and post-To'ul'h have forgotten the practice, and there are some homeworld cultures (notably the nomads of the uplands) that never knew it.

To'ul'hs do not have the usual graphic arts known to humans, except in the form of textures and incisions on a suitable surface. Their written records are designed to be detectable by touch or by sonar: glyphs or ideographs carved into a surface, or runic inscriptions, or Braille-like bumps and hollows, depending on the language and culture. Sculptures are usually intended to be pleasing to the touch, or to give interesting patterns when scanned with a sonar chirp.

To'ul'h of the lowlands did not wear clothes, other than professional equipment (aprons, tool belts, armour, etc.), though they did often wear beads, or in some cultures decorated their skin with patterns of scars. Those of the highlands wore protection against the cold and tended to consider it impolite or even obscene not to enclose the main body (though arms, legs, and the flaps between them remained free).

As an agricultural species for nearly 100,000 years of history, the To'ul'h have an extraordinarily deep and rich set of traditions around gardening and farming for practical or aesthetic reasons. The shape and styles of To'ul'h gardens varied strongly according to culture, from various pseudo-naturalistic designs to highly abstract formal patterns, and from nearly barren arrangements of rock and sand to lush well-watered landscapes. Though they are designed to appeal to sonar or the sense of smell rather than sight, and employ fungi and saprophytes in place of plants, humans find them surprisingly pleasant to look upon, though of course To'ul'h gardens lack any colours other than black or white or various phosphorescent blooms, and the scents they give off tend to be sulphurous and pleasant only to To'ul'hese life.

There are as many styles of To'ul'h architecture as there are of human architecture, but the To'ul'hs are much more inclined than humans to create substantial stone or subterranean structures, or collapsible tent-like structures, to resist or avoid the powerful but slow surface winds. Another important difference arises from the To'ul'h ability to glide long distances. To'ul'h generally regard upper windows and balconies as preferred exit points from a building. Some of the most famous great To'ul'h cities are built on cliffs or steep hillsides, or in the ravines of the great rivers that run down from the continental plateaus. In such places the houses of the wealthy are most often at the highest points, since for a To'ul'h this give access to a broad region of the lower part of a town or city; one need only launch oneself from a suitable elevation.

A fear of the bright turbulent overworld, with its killing chill, its lightning and thunder, and its burning ultraviolet rays is innate in every baseline and nearbaseline To'ul'h. Most of the planet-bound cultures believed the upper regions to be hell, or at the least a metaphor for a hellish state. This caused considerable fear and suspicion when the To'ul'h were first contacted by Terragens, since they came from above.
"