During the last Ice Age, about 30,000 years ago, Homo sapiens sapiens - modern humans - were physically the same as people living today. Although the physical characteristics of human beings have changed little since the Ice Age ended about 10,000 years ago, cultural evolution has dramatically transformed human society. In the time span encompassed by Ice Age Paleolithic societies on the one end and contemporary information-based societies on the other, a succession of forms of social organization has unfolded.
The succession can be conceptualized in terms of the
transformation of dominant technological types, and the structural and
institutional changes catalyzed by them. Nomadic hunting-gathering groups
domesticated plants and animals and were consequently transformed into
settled agrarian-pastorial societies. Agrarian-pastorial societies
evolved technologies such as irrigation and crop rotation, further
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Societies around the world evolved along remarkably parallel lines,
becoming larger and more complex, forming stratified systems of social
organization, and developing political systems in which power and
control were increasingly concentrated in the hands of elites. The
nomadic groups of the Paleolithic metamorphosed into the settled
villages of the Neolithic. The small settlements gave way to agrarian
empires, local kingdoms and city-states, which were succeeded by
nation-states. 
