ABSTRACT
The Anthropocene is a proposed epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact of the Earth’s geology and ecosystems. The idea of human impact and ecosystem is common in the public relations body of knowledge, by defining public relations as a communication process to build and preserve mutual and beneficial relations between an organization and its publics. Therefore, the principle here is the construction and the maintenance of beneficial relationships with the organizational ecosystem through an influence process led by people on the dominant coalitions of organizations. This ontological standpoint offers the opportunity of approaching public relations as an anthropocentric practice in the climate of trust between organizations and their publics. Nonetheless, this perspective can be considered metaphorical. For this reason, this chapter wants to go further, and analyzes how the origins of today’s public relations can be approached from the same point of view. Indeed, public relations-like activities started, in Prehistory, to solve prestige concerns in early complexes’ social structures, in which power relations were established and managed, in part, through a direct impact on ecosystem. Thus, this new approach has important effects on the ontology and historiography of public relations.
