This may all be totally unhelpful to you. I don't know.

Human culture certainly has a history. We (humans) started accumulating culture because very long term biological evolution (which is long, but not quite eternal) enabled us to do that. Eventually our cultural accumulation became "civilization" and we invented writing as a way of capturing spoken language. We started recording our ideas VERY recently in our species' history -- only 5,000 years ago (give or take 15 minutes, either way).

"Concepts" are a language thing. Prior to our development as a species with language (much further back than the invention of writing) there were no concepts. So, everything in our cultural accumulation, including everything written and passed on through word of mouth (language), has a history.

since Ancient Greece, a major philosophical enterprise has been to define reality in terms of immutable, eternal concepts. — Brian

Things get a bit tricky, partly because of the historically very recent post-modernist idea that "reality is constructed". Let's not go there.

There certainly are real "immutable, eternal" things which are part of reality -- like matter and energy, which have behaved more or less consistently since the universe came into existence. What we think about matter and energy, however, is strictly historical. DNA has been around for a long, long time (billions of years) but we have developed the concept of DNA, genetics, evolution, etc. only recently in our history.

The same goes for all of our thinking about behavior. Our "human, animal behavior" has existed far longer than our collection of concepts (which arose, presumably, with language). It is likely that people behaved "kindly", "cruelly", "mercifully", "bravely" -- maybe even "morally" before there were "concepts" of morality. We didn't invent kindness when we invented language. We gave it a "sign" -- a word.

The history of concepts apparently extends back into a time before we have history, but it is "historical" none the less.

Bitter, that all seems pretty right to me. I think at least in this period of Nietzsche's thought he would also basically agree. He does seem to be something of a scientific realist when it comes to the natural sciences in the early part of Human, All Too Human such that he would agree in perhaps the eternity of things like matter and energy. It's funny because he refers to this type of knowledge as "little, humble" truths as opposed to the grandiose Truths of metaphysics, which are false errors anyway. Although on my view there's nothing particular humble or little about physics, but I guess when you put physics up against a Platonic or a Christian or a Kantian system there is kind of humbleness to it.

There are so many passages, especially in middle and late period Nieztsche, where he seems to regard all truth as error, even scientific truths. This is the strain of Nietzscheian thought as well as postmodern thought that I have never been able to get on board with. That our universe is constituted by energy-matter is not a falsehood or error, even if those concepts are historical in nature; whereas the concept that there are things-in-themselves that are real essences of things versus their empirical appearances is a major error. At least that's how I see it, and i think how Nietzsche sees it, in this period.

Nietzsche has always been so frustrating to me because so many different passages in his different books seem blatantly contradictory and sometimes even internally incoherent. But I'm finding a real beauty, value, and truthfulness to Human, All Too Human right now.

Thanks for helping me think some of this through even more clearly, I very much appreciate it.

Further, I've always been incredulous of interpretations by Brian Leiter and similar Nietzschian scholars that Nietzsche - in certain points of time and / or certain passages has some kind of robust scientific epistemology and realist metaphysics that support the natural sciences because the postmodernist side of Nietzsche has always overshadowed that to me. But in these beginning passes of H,ATH, he really does bring that side of himself out in a striking way.