Evolution and Forms of Socio-Political Organization

It is no coincidence that history and socio-cultural anthropology have the same progenitor. We all know from childhood that Herodotus is the ‘father of history’. But he should also rightfully be considered the ‘father of anthropology.’ In his work ‘History’, already in the fifth century BCE, he formulated a number of most essential for anthropology questions and to address them used methods and hypotheses that became classical for anthropological science many centuries later (Hodgen 1964: 20–28). Thus, already two and a half thousand years ago, in one of the greatest creations of ancient culture, the fruitfulness of the union of ‘the muse of history and the science of culture’ (Carneiro 2000) in solving the problems of both disciplines was demonstrated