Where and when did the concept of society originally originate?
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Answer:
Depending on your definition of human society, the history of human society could start as recently as 7,000 years ago when we first started to employ agriculture as a primary method of obtaining food and started building large, permanent settlements or as far back as 2,000,000 billion years ago when homo habilis, the distant ancestor of homo sapiens (of which we are homo sapiens sapiens), first appeared. We will define human society as a society that organizes homo sapiens sapiens and thus restrict our discussion to what the archaeological record from the past 100,000 years (give or take 30,000 years) tells us, as our species has been determined to be somewhere between 200,000 and 240,000 years old, and the development of modern homo sapiens sapiens appears to have started in the middle Paleolithic around 100,000 years ago.
The definition of human society, which is characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive culture or institution, is broad. As a result, economic arguments, social and religious arguments, and industrial arguments can be equally valid. The freedom of choice in viewpoint presents a great deal of complexity in an effort to organize the history of human society around a common theme as an in-depth focus on one organizational theme could downplay the importance of another theme, which might have had more relevance at a certain point in (pre)history.
This paper defines early human society as the early societies that formed in the middle Paleolithic, shortly after homo sapiens sapiens first appeared, and evolved through the Neolithic, when hunter gatherer societies started to experiment with agriculture and form semi-permanent and permanent settlements, until the societies reached a universally accepted stage of civilization sometime in the early bronze age. In other words, under the classification of Ed Tyler, this paper will discuss the transformation from hunter-gatherers through barbarism to the dawn of modern civilization. The discussion will cover the evolution chronologically, as this will allow all of the relevant social, economic and technological advancements to be discussed on equal footing.
Mesolithic (approx. 13,000 to 8,000 BC)
The Mesolithic, which was relatively short compared to the upper and late Paleolithic and occurred at the end of the last ice-age, was a period of relatively rapid advancement for homo sapiens as they, in the words of British anthropologist Ed Tyler, entered the stage of barbarism for the first time. (Tyler believed that humanity had three stages of achievement: (1) early prehistoric bands that survived as hunter gatherers, (2) barbarism where people started to cultivate crops and domesticate animals in simple societies, and (3) civilization, which started with the complex societies of the Egyptians and Sumerians.)
Neolithic (approx. 8,000 to 4,000 BC)
The Neolithic was, in the words of British anthropologist Ed Tyler, the dawn of barbarism for homo sapiens as they started to cultivate crops, domesticate animals for a variety of tasks, and form permanent settlements that paved the way for more complex societies, like those of the Sumerians and Egyptians, that many anthropologists still refer to as the dawn of civilization.
Bronze Age (approx 4,000
Bronze, which may have been used as early as 4500 BC near Ban Chiang, Thailand, supplied the most useful metal known during the third and second millennia B.C. It replaced (primarily cold-hammered) copper and stone as the metal of choice for tools, weapons, and art and allowed for the construction of tools and weapons that were harder and longer lasting than the stone and (cold-hammered) copper predecessors.
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