Appendix: stages of development from the era of archaic humans to the axial age

This is an appendix to the article H.Patomäki: ”On the Historicity of Social Ontology”, published in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 2020; 1–23; https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12254. It summarises the long, multi-phased and complicated process that led to the emergence of full-scale language, reflective consciousness and complex society in the Axial Age. The social world has continued to evolve also since then. The point is to indicate the geo-historical specificity of the world described by social ontologists such as John Searle and various critical realists.