Practices change daily, but underlying values patterns in societies change slowly, across many generations. The cultural spectrum of today's world is influenced by the major events in human history that took place in the last millennia. During millions of years of hunter-gatherer existence in small groups, our ancestors gradually became better at communicating and at creating things.
Genetic data suggest that a tiny population left Africa around 50,000 years ago. Descendents of these people have since then populated the world. They invented agriculture, starting slowly around 10,000 years ago at the end of the last glaciations. Agriculture, in the course of a number of millennia, enabled the occurrence of villages, towns, cities and finally states and empires.
These huge concentrations of populations demanded adaptations in culture: more meekness, the acceptance of distant leaders, and a tolerance for specialization. The result of these developments is the huge spectrum of cultures of today, with some peoples adhering to individualistic, egalitarian, opportunistic hunter-gatherer-like values and others living in collectivistic, hierarchical societies - with innumerable variations and nuances that are described in a concise way in Geert Hofstede's framework of dimensions of national culture.
The precise history of cultural values will always remain a matter of guesswork, since values leave no fossils. And we are talking here of time scales of change of, usually, centuries or millennia. But it is a safe guess that in terms of dimensions of culture (see next subpage) hunter-gatherers have had rather individualistic, small power-distance, uncertainty tolerant, long-term oriented cultures. Agriculture and massive societies have led to more collectivistic, large power distance, uncertainty avoiding cultures.
Pastoralism is associated with masculine, short term oriented cultures. Masculinity and Indulgence could be related to a history of competition and to environmental plenty, respectively. But in all of this, there is great variation and path dependency. Small populations of settlers during the times of human expansion through the world will have primed new cultural lines, some of which may have spread to entire nations or regions. More on these issues can be found in Cultures and Organizations 3rd ed, chapter 12 (June 2010).