Note: Earliest (surviving) written law refers to the Code of Hammurabi, -- a few others date back even further, to about 2100 BC

100,000 years BC - Mankind has spread throughout Asia, Africa and Europe by this time.  Not to the northern latitudes though, we are in an ice age.  The Americas have no humans, but it does have the woolly mammoth, giant sloths and the fearsome, armored, knobby tailed glyptodont, a relic of the dinosaurs.  The original tribe has mixed, remixed.  The practice of weapons making, scouting and killing the less advanced peoples it encounters continues.   But, eventually this type of group  begins to lose the battles and lose bad.  You see, in some isolated areas, outcast tribes have tamed fire and begun using the wheel.  They have begun to domesticate animals.  With the wheel the new others can bring cartloads of rocks and spears. They sneak into the enemies town at night, set fire to it, run still nearly wild horses and dogs through it, and finish off the survivors with their clubs, rocks and spears.  They make better ropes and now practice archery.

As the New Others win land and settle in they establish the very first permanent towns, walls, moats.  In a few patch gardening has begun, and with it our next vocation, the farmer.  This also signals a new phase of economic development, a store of wealth, food is in part commodified, the temple granary becomes an important center point of life.

50,000 years BP - A pattern has begun to develop; where civilization is developing, language gets more intricate, allowing for the sharing of more complex concepts, tactics and strategies.  Rules become codified, storage of food and farming become evermore intertwined with life and the people become a bit more sedentary.  The witch doctor is evolving into a priestly class in response to the new more complex thinking that begins to ponder its place in the universe.

Meanwhile, in the less civilized areas, in the mountains and deserts for example, life is not quite so easy.  They remain lean and hard, nomadic, ready to conquer.   The cityfolk tended toward using animals to pull carts, whereas the nomadic used the horses to ride.

By this point in our story the general form of the map, the outlines of the continents, is at a point that we  would recognize today.  The solid lands we take for granted are but rafts floating on a sea of lava, and always moving, (plate tectonics) albeit at only an inch per year, -- the maps from over a 100,000 years ago would start to look very different.

Climate plays a role in our story, for over a million years we have been in an ice age.   The earliest settlers have crossed over into the Americas from Asia following the west coast pushing further south with each successive generation.  Wind also has a part, but, other than spreading seeds, does not figure significantly for another 45,000 years, then it will matter a lot.

The earliest symbolic forms of exchange begin to emerge signalling a slow but steady move from barter to cash based transactions.  Early man uses meat, salt, shells, and other portable forms of coinage.