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Simple: the earth produces a fuck tonne less food for like half the year, requiring some kind of strategy to handle the fact you have lots of food half the time and like no food the other half.
We took the "stash it in a special spot" approach.
But how do we stop other us's from stealing our stashes?
Strength in numbers, ape strong together. We form villages.
As we grow, we need leadership, mechanisms to keep track of each other, protect each other, and rules with how to fairly treat bad actors.
Laws, democracy, judicial systems come into play.
Oh shit, other village has cool shit. They want our cool shit. Trade? Trade! Commerce comes into play.
How do we keep track of people that are reliable to trade with and can be trusted across Trade networks?
Credit. Village A vouches on behalf of Trader, they have Credability, you can trust them.
Many villages create a unified system to describe this trust in a metric...
Thus: credit score.
In other words you have a credit score because of the way the earth makes food (that is to say, about half the time)
I'd place a lot less of the cause of credit scores on the Earth's seasons than you, but this does make me wonder what the economic systems would look like on a habitable planet with no seasons, with year round stable temperatures/humidity/etc.
Most of society as a whole is due to it.
Herd behavior as a whole primarily comes about due to food scarcity strategies to improve security.
When groups of animals fight over food, they naturally form into larger groups to improve odds of success and then share the spoils.
In low scarcity scenarios typically you see herd behavior rarer and rarer, there's little need to form a pack if you have all your needs already met, why bother?
Actually credit scores came about in the 1700-1800s but were turned into their modern design in the 1980s.
So just a little bit later than when you're describing.
Credit scores weren't called "credit scores" of course.
It would be along the limes of having the church or kingdom or etc's blessing, or paperwork to indicate you are with a given trade guild or etc.
It came in many different flavors, as many different countries... exist....
Point being that there *were * long before mechanisms for many different villages and cities having an agreed upon mechanism for discerning "can we trust this person?"
The principle of Identification was a very early on problem that needed solving.
If some rando rrolls into your village claiming to be a trader selling official wares of (some other village), how would you know they were who they said they were?
Typically signed documents with an official seal was a good first start.
And that network of everyone agreeing so-and-so networks seals were associated with good traders that sold good wares is your first concept of a "credit score".
In reality existing banks today assigning people credit scores is just an abstracted system around the fundamentally simple concept of a trade guild.
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Everyone trusts the banks mechanisms for scoring.
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The banks are involved in all major transactions and seal their official approval on them
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And thus everyone participates in the trade guild by performing transactions with their legal tender.
This is sort of a fairly mandatory mechanism, and it's not even a terribly complex one tbh.
The only thing modern about it is the fact we store people's scores digitally and can share that info all across the world instantly. Which is very handy.
But it literally is just a number that evaluates "how much can you trust this person with lending them stuff" based on past times they've been trusted with important shot that got lent to them.
Unga lent Bunga his stick.
Bunga broke Ungas stick.
Unga tells whole village what happened.
Now no one will lend Bunga a new stick.
Credit score.
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You play Civ don't you