Try the key words "Amala", "Kamala" or "feral children" or even "Mowgli". The former two are the names of two sisters who were apparently raised/socialized in the wild by wolves and then socialized into human society, the last is the name of Kipling's character from the Jungle Book. I think there is some psychological condition named after him.
As long as we're dealing with mere physiology, I think it's _conceivable_ that human beings could live like those animals which meet only to breed. However there seems to be very little knowledge of such instances, indicating (but not "proving", in my sense) that the social context is necessary to human life.
I tend to agree. Logically, I think it is theoretically possible for humans to live as solitary creatures, only coming together to mate. But I would expect the individual humans wouldn't be as "successful" as those who are socialized within human society.
Carrol says: This way of putting it would in fact be a denial of a unity of society and the individual -- in other words, it is really only a way of denying while seeming to assert assert socialization. We have on the one hand "society" and on the other hand "individuals," and the former somehow creates the individuals. Weird.
Is what you're saying that individuals and the society in which they are embedded resonate with one another, kind of like a fractal?
The best answer to your question (or at least the beginning of the best answer) is to note that the question implies its own answer in so far as it is a question that could only be asked within a complex or ensemble of social relations.
Society doesn't create us, and we have no existence prior to and independent of our social relations. So both statements, "humans create society" and "society creates individuls," are simply incoherent.
If one takes the two contradictory statements as universal absolutes then, yes, I agree that would be incoherent. But if one "meshes" the two together as I mentioned above, that seems to overcome the contradiction, doesn't it?
>From what I know, however, social
relations (or species that had no existence independently of their
social relations) long pre-date homo sapiens: or to put it otherwise,
human society is several million years older than humanity.
Yes, I do agree with this statement, although I wouldn't use the term "human society" to describe "societies" of like animals (e.g. chimps, elephants, predatory mammals) who live, find food, observe the world and each other all together. The big question is how much is instinctual behaviour and how much is learned?
Todd