Urgesellschaft

This article may be a rough translation from German. It may have been generated, in whole or in part, by a computer or by a translator without dual proficiency. Please help to enhance the translation. The original article is under "Deutsch" in the "languages" list. If you have just labeled this article as needing attention, please add {{subst:Needtrans|pg=Urgesellschaft |language=de |comments= }} ~~~~ to the bottom of the WP:PNTCU section on Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English. (August 2022)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding articles in Ukrainian and Russian. Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 266 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Ukrainian Wikipedia article at [[:uk:Первісне суспільство]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|uk|Первісне суспільство}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Urgesellschaft (meaning "primal society" in German) is a term that, according to Friedrich Engels,^[1] refers to the original coexistence of humans in prehistoric times, before recorded history. Here, a distinction is made between the kind of Homo sapiens as humans, who hardly differed from modern humans biologically (an assertion disputed by anthropology), and other representatives of the genus Homo such as the Homo erectus or the Neanderthal. Engels claimed "that animal family dynamics and human primitive society are incompatible things" because "the primitive humans that developed out of animalism either knew no family at all or at most one that does not occur among animals".^[1] The U.S. anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and translations of his books also make use of the term.^[2]

In specificity, this long period of time is not directly accessible through historical sources. Nevertheless, in archaeology, the study of material cultures provides a variety of opportunities to gain a better understanding of this period, work that is likewise present in sociobiology and social anthropology, and in religious studies through the analysis of prehistoric mythologies.