“Civilization” like any word about the birth of humanity has multiple conflicting, self referential definitions.  In light of the Eden moment aka:  ‘the birth of the civilization’ gene it gets much easier.

Civilization – Civilization is a group of one or more societies supporting specialization.

Compare this with this page, with does a decent job of spelling out all of the conflicting definitions to date. http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/6.3/brown.html

The key to this new definition is a very specific definition of society.

Society – A group applying the attributes of cooperation,intelligence,communication,trust, and life scale duration.

By life scale duration I mean a portion of the life of a groups member, dividing their life into several small parts.  For a few examples, childhood, retirement, parenthood, etc.  Of course people can show an interest in a society for a short period of time, but they need to make a long term commitment to be part of it.

Here is a chart showing different animals, and what kind of organizations they can form.

[table]Society Type,Primate,Canine,”Human(empath)”,”Human(psychopath)”
cooperation,*,*,*,*
intelligence,*, ,*,*
communication,*,*,*,*
trust, , ,*,
duration, *,*,*,*
most complete group,troop,pack,society,alliance[/table]

A few notes.  Trust in society is an irrational to the self or selfless behaviour, benefiting others with no clear guarantee of return.  Neither submission or cooperation reflects trust.  Trust may be displayed between immediate family members, parents, children, and possibly grandparents or first cousins, this is present in too many animals to count and is separate from society.