We’ve always had social contracts, understandings of relationships in the specialization of roles where some people in the tribe hunted and protected the tribe, and others gathered and sheltered the tribe. People have traded physical objects in real time since the dawn of modern man. Contracts are a more recent phenomenon, as we began trading promises, not property. Oral agreements proved easily manipulated or misremembered, and eyewitnesses were unreliable. Doubt and distrust tempered collaboration with strangers.
