Social networking existed much before Internet, technology

Modern-day social networks like Facebook and Twitter may help you stay more connected, but a new study has found that such long-distance networks existed even before the advent of Internet. Researchers studied thousands of ceramic and obsidian artifacts from 1200-1450 AD to learn about the growth, collapse and change of social networks in the late pre-Hispanic Southwest. The study led by University of Arizona anthropologist Barbara Mills, sheds light on the transformation of social networks and shows that people of that period were able to maintain surprisingly long-distance relationships with nothing more than their feet to connect them. They found that early social networks do not appear to have been as restricted as expected by settlements’ physical distance from one another. Researchers found that similar types of painted pottery were being created and used in villages as far as 250 km apart, suggesting people were maintaining relationships across relatively large geographic expanses. ‘They were making, using and discarding very similar kinds of assemblages over these very large spaces, which means that a lot of their daily practises were the same,’ Mills said. ‘That doesn’t come about by chance, it has to come about by interaction,’ she added.