Human Society has a much longer history than the social sciences devoted to its study. Efforts are continually being made to reconstruct our past by pre-historians, archaeologists and scholars of ancient history. In doing so, they have searched for whatever credible evidence they could gather, mostly in the form of artefacts and elements of material culture. The gaps in our knowledge were mostly filled with conjectures. Besides descriptive accounts, some of the scholars attempted to build theories of change. While we have a somewhat better understanding of our past compared to our ancestors, gaps still remain.
There are many unanswered questions about our past. As we go further back, we become more unsure about the then existing reality. Of course, literate societies have the advantage of some written records of bygone years. But even that evidence does not cover all of their past, particularly that of the prehistoric era. In the case of preliterate societies—our primitive contemporaries—history lives through the memory of the present inhabitants and gets blurred after five or six generations of their ancestors. Beyond that, all is myth. In the absence of any credible evidence, societies invent myths to satiate the desire of their members to know about their antecedents.
The curiosity to know the origins persists in all societies. But it can be safely said that the present of our societies is built on the foundations of the past.
Scholars are unanimous in believing that the past was different from the present, that it was less complex and heavily dependent on nature. As we moved from the past to the present, we continually became more complex as a society, with differentiation in roles and positions, and began taming nature to suit our needs. This is the acknowledgment of the phenomenon of change, whether we talk of the Human Society as such, or of particular societies.
No society is static. Change is a continuous process that pervades all societies. As Kasper D. Naegele says, ‘a theory of society recognizes the impossibility of leaving the past behind’.
Where did we come from? This common question was taken up by scholars to document the history of mankind. Influenced by Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859, students of society attempted to trace the evolution of human society1—not this or that society, but the phenomenon of society that is unique to the species, the Homo Sapiens. Writing in 1877, Lewis Henry Morgan asserted in his Ancient Society: ‘The great antiquity of mankind on earth has been conclusively established’. Noting the presence of humanity in the glacial period and even hypothesizing their origin in a prior geological age, Morgan announced that the ‘history of the human race (read Species) is one in source, one in experience, one in progress’. He felt that this,
[K]nowLedge changes materially the views which have prevailed respecting the relations of savages to barbarism, and of barbarism to civilized men. It can now be asserted upon convincing evidence that savagery preceded barbarism in all the tribes of mankind, as barbarism is known to have preceded civilization.
Morgan thus laid the foundation of the theory of social evolution.
The early theories of change concentrated on the direction of change—evolutionary or cyclical.
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