A little later, under the sign of assimilated European ideas, East Slavic culture began to develop.

This is how the public will expressed itself.

Associations in which taboos were violated inevitably disappeared. Social relations were finally established when the requirements of the team to the individual became the inner need of each member, and stronger than his biological instincts. It happened about 40-35 thousand years ago. Since then, cultural evolution has begun to determine the development of humanity, which has proceeded at a faster pace, increased the number of alternative forms of human behavior in relations with the environment.

Noting the peculiarities of cultural evolution, we emphasized that it is based on the preservation of knowledge, the acquisition of new knowledge and their transmission to future generations. In order to preserve and develop all its new social essence, to socialize in the proper direction of each individual, humanity had to give him the whole set of their social life – productive abilities, principles of relationships (taboos), as well as the spiritual world that began to take shape: thoughts, feelings, become people.

In the Upper Paleolithic (35 thousand years ago) a situation arose in which a significant part of social life could not be coded, embodied and transmitted by existing means. What means did the cultural evolution have at the time?

First of all, as already mentioned, the development of tools, the transfer of production experience in the process of teaching juniors to seniors.

There was language as a means of communication, though extremely primitive, undeveloped.

Certain moral ideas have already regulated the behavior of people, determined their attitude to each other, to the team, to people of the opposite sex, the world around them. This was taught from childhood.

Mythology, through the spiritualization of nature, tried to give a coherent and general picture of the world, although not in the conscious, but rather in a modeled, "pictorial" figurative form.

Predmagy served as a means of practical influence on the world and gave a person confidence in the success of the proposed business, passed on experience in various spheres of life. In particular, it is very likely that in primitive people hunting was preceded by his rehearsal. The complexity of hunting inevitably required at some stage a preliminary development of an action plan. Due to the extreme specificity of primitive man’s thinking, the elaboration of a hunting plan and the distribution of roles could take place only in the form of a staging of a hunt, which was not initially magical, but in the future was bound to become a rite – so magic arises.

All the means mentioned above preserved the existing social relations and the spiritual world of the people. Their limitation was that each of these means had a narrow field of application in social life (tools – the economy, taboos – moral life, etc.). They were factors in the external interaction of man and the world. In primitive society, there were probably quite frequent bursts of individualism, which manifested itself in various anti-social manifestations, so a tool was needed that, reproducing social values ​​and the "necessary model of life" directly and unforced influence on human worldview , regulating its behavior. The complicated spiritual world of the individual was in no way able to reflect and preserve any of these means.

These problems could be solved only with the advent of art. Art is able to absorb and convey all possible situations of human-world interaction, all situations of human relations, without any local restrictions. Art reflects both the material and spiritual aspects of social life. Art completely reproduces reality: it can preserve in a reflected form the material side of life and those human states, those types of human response to reality that are associated with them.

In the artistic perception of all life, reflected in art, "comes to life" even for a person who has no personal experience of something like this. Due to this, the individual is able to resurrect, and therefore retain and transmit the experience, thoughts, feelings of the community. Art is the most accessible form of learning, because it is perceived in a specific form of real life.

The huge role of art in the development of mankind was that it contributed to the development of creative principles in the individual. The fact is that the original system was conservative, required strict adherence to taboos, no individual interpretations were allowed, which hindered the identification of initiative, individual freedom. Art – by its very nature and nature of influence on the perceiver requires creativity from people (completion of an open model, the correlation of the experience of the transmitter and the perceiver; the influence of thoughts and feelings, the law of assimilation, emancipation in perception).

Art, due to the effect of transmitted information in the perceiver, did not preserve life, but made it a "real" reality, a life revived in thought, feeling, state, motivation. Thus, art proved to be both a means capable of best conveying the socially necessary vital activity by resurrecting it in the individual, and a means of promoting neutralization, or even to some extent the removal of zoological individualism in behavior. Art does not create a copy, a mold of the world (reality) – in this case, it would be unnecessary for the individual. Its subject is the value of human existence, which develops in the individual his human essence.

Cultural evolution with the emergence of art – this universal mechanism for storing and transmitting social information from generation to generation – has become irreversible and accelerated.

Art is the self-consciousness of culture. The universality of art as a means of preserving life has not only not been lost over the centuries, but on the contrary, has increased, because new types and genres have appeared in it. Artistic and expressive means became more diverse, and this led to the fact that the life of society and man became possible to embody in art more multifaceted and perfect.

Thus, cultural evolution in the period when society and man were fully formed, was represented by the following information channels: the evolution of tools, language, moral norms, mythology, art, religion (its first form – magic), the content of which determined, "fixed" originality of behavior, worldview of man in the Upper Paleolithic era.

What are the main stages of cultural evolution of mankind? It is common in culturology to divide human history into three major stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization, proposed at the end of the eighteenth century. Scottish philosopher Henri Ferguson. In the XIX century. American ethnographer L. Morgan and then F. Engels linked the selection of each of these epochs with a certain level of material culture, with easy narrative essay topics specific forms of economic development. The epochs of savagery correspond to those farms that "appropriate" (gathering, hunting and fishing), the epochs of barbarism – those that produce (early agriculture and livestock), the epoch of civilization – developed agricultural culture, industrial and scientific-technical culture …

Thus, we see that the main criterion of the stages of cultural evolution is the criterion of material, the development of productive forces, which will eventually determine the originality of cultural and historical epochs. With cultural evolution – the evolution of the human spirit – ideal factors in turn significantly affect the material culture of society.

In the theory of culture, the concept of "civilization" is very close to the concept of culture. It is important for us to define the essence of these concepts. As noted above, the concept of "civilization" was introduced into science as the name of a certain stage in the cultural evolution of mankind, beginning in 3500 BC. BC and continues to this day. During a discussion of ancient cities in Chicago in 1958, scholars proposed three features of civilization: monumental architecture, writing, and cities. This triad clearly characterizes civilization primarily as a cultural complex, while the socio-economic essence of this phenomenon is the emergence of class society and the state. Architectural monuments are indicative in terms of the productive potential of the society that created them.

The emergence of writing characterizes the separation of mental work from physical, which allowed us to focus the efforts of certain groups of people on the development of art and various forms of positive knowledge. Cities performed specific functions in the social system: they were the centers of the agricultural district, the centers of crafts and trade, and a kind of ideological centers. It was at the time of the first civilizations that the ideological sphere, systematized and centralized, became a truly enormous force.

Thus, civilization was formed only at a certain stage of human development, representing a qualitative limit on the evolutionary path. There are different types, stages, levels of civilization. The principal position of scientists of the Soviet period was the selection of formational types of civilization (slave type, feudal type, etc.). This approach differed from the views of many Western scholars, who are mainly based on the concept of Arnold Toynbee.

In the 30’s – 50’s of our century in the works "Civilization before the test" and "Study of History" A. Toynbee tried to explain the development of all human cultures, applying the concept of "civilization" to the peculiarities of peoples and cultures of different regions and countries. As a result, world history has taken the form of a mosaic panel composed of the multi-line development of sovereign cultures that are close together and coexist. However, A. Toynbee proved that despite all the differences and dissimilarities of cultures of different peoples, they all belong to a single civilization and in their development sooner or later go through identical stages, which are characterized by the same ideas, and although have their own characteristics and essence.

For example, the basic ideas of the Enlightenment, without which it is impossible to imagine modern civilization: all people are equal by nature, each person – a unique personality, man – the goal of society, not a means, and others – is a legacy of European culture of the XVIII century. A little later, under the sign of assimilated European ideas, East Slavic culture began to develop. These ideas nourished the work of Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian educators. And sit down from the end of the XIX – the beginning.