When Does the Historical Process Start

Discussion

Leonid Grinin et al. :

"We start from the period about 40,000−50,000 years ago (but to facilitate our calculation we take the date of 40,000 years ago), that is, since the appearance of the first indisputable indications of truly human culture and society. To understand the reason for the choice of precisely this landmark one should take into consideration that any periodization must have some conceptual and formal unity at its basis. In particular, we believe that it is possible to speak about social evolution in its proper sense only since the time when social forces became the basic driving forces for the development of human communities. We suppose that the era of anthropogenesis should include not only that long period of time when our apelike ancestors (Ingold 2002: 8) were gradually obtaining an anatomical resemblance to modern human beings (that is approximately till 100200 thousand years ago), but the subsequent rather long period (that lasted for many thousands of years) when those creatures anatomically similar to us were turning into Homo sapiens sapiens, that is becoming people in their intellectual, social, mental and language development.

Of course, during this second phase of anthropogenesis the role of social forces in the general balance of driving forces was much larger than it was during the first phase. However, we believe that in general, during the whole process of anthropogenesis the driving forces were primarily biological, and only to a rather small degree were they social. Of course, it was a very long process and one cannot point out a definite moment when a crucial change took place (as most likely in a literal sense there was not such a radical turn). Nevertheless, we believe that after reaching the above-mentioned landmark of 40,000−50,000 years ago the social component of the evolutionary driving forces became dominant.12 We also believe that for the same reasons it is not possible to speak about humankind as a set of societies before this time. Thus, the notions serving the basis for our periodization – formations of historical process and production principles – cannot be applied to the periods prior to 40,000−50,000 years ago. Thus, our periodization starts with the most important production revolution for the humankind; what is more, people themselves are, undoubtedly, part of the productive forces.'

Additional detail from the footnote:

" Note that this date is not identical with the modern dating of the emergence of Homo sapiens sa- piens (100,000–200,000 years ago). Though discoveries of the recent decades have shifted the date of the Homo sapiens sapiens formation back in time to 100–200 thousand years ago (see, e.g., Stringer 1990; Bar-Yosef 2002; Bar-Yosef and Vandermeersch 1993; Marks 1993; Pääbo 1995; Gibbons 1997; Holden 1998; Culotta 1999; Kaufman 1999; Lambert 1991; Zhdanko 1999; Klima 2003: 206; White et al. 2003; Shea 2007), the landmark of 40,000–50,000 years ago still retains its major significance. This is that time, since which we can definitely speak about the humans of modern cultural type, in particular, about the presence of developed languages and ‘distinctly human’ culture (Bar-Yosef and Vandermeersch 1993: 94). And though there are suggestions that developed languages appeared well before 40–50 thousand years ago, these suggestions remain rather hypothetical. Most researchers suppose that the dependence on language appeared not earlier than 40,000 years ago (see Holden 1998: 1455), whereas, as Richard Klein maintains, ‘everybody would accept that 40,000 years ago language is everywhere’ (see Holden 1998: 1455). Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford University, has offered a theory which could explain such a gap between the origin of anatomically modern Homo sapiens and much later emergence of language and cultural artifacts: the modern mind is the result of a rapid genetic change. He puts the date of change at around 50,000 years ago, pointing out that the rise of cultural artifacts comes after that date, as does the spread of modern humans from Africa (see Zimmer 2003: 41ff.). So the period 50,000–40,000 years ago was the time the beginning of social evolution in the narrow sense (see below)."

(http://www.sociostudies.org/books/files/macrohistory_and_globalization/015-045.pdf)