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This notion that the world, or humanity at large, might be fallen from some earlier "perfect" state is of course found all over the place in the history of thought. By way of example, a description of the Golden Age, or the age of Truth, from the Mahabharata:

> Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labour, because all that men required was obtained by the power of will; the chief virtue was the abandonment of all worldly desires. The Krita Yuga was without disease; there was no lessening with the years; there was no hatred or vanity, or evil thought whatsoever; no sorrow, no fear. All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness.

(There might even be something to it, given how long human history from the emergence of behaviorally-modern humans (10,000 BC?) to the beginning of the historical record actually was. Who's to say that human societies in that time period did not gradually evolve to a sort of cultural- and value- "modernity", that was subsequently forgotten in some sort of great, worldwide social crisis? That might have been the true "Fall from Eden" perhaps, scattering human societies far and wide.)