Here is a great update on what early human social consciousness might have looked like:
“Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos more recent efforts at classifying hunter-gatherers into either “simple” or “complex” types of social organisation, since what have been identified as the features of “complexity” – territoriality, social ranks, material wealth or competitive display – appear during certain seasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact same population. Admittedly, most professional anthropologists nowadays have come to recognise that these categories are hopelessly inadequate, but the main effect of this acknowledgment has just been to cause them to change the subject, or suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t really be thinking about the broad sweep of human history at all any more. Nobody has yet proposed an alternative.”
