The history of civilization is closely tied with the history of the fence. Human civilization is conceptualized as emerging from agriculture, family and property. All of these evolved with the fence.
In the early stages of settling human tribes tended to till the land in a group. Caesar, in Gallic War describes how amongst the ancient Germans "there were no separate estates or private boundaries." Tacitus elaborates that the Germans practiced the so-called "shifting cultivation" -- making a plantation, reaping the crop and then moving on. This kind of land usage does not need fences but in the long run it leads to wide-range destruction of woods and severe soil erosion so it is usually called "predatory cultivation" or "land-mining.