I’m not asking this from a biology lens, I get that aspect, but more from the sociology/anthropology lens. My question is which culture started using 18 as this hard cutoff, when, and under what reasoning.
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The simple answer is that it isn’t, even now not every country uses 18 as a cutoff, and few countries even use the same age for cutoffs for “adulthood” by different criteria (marriage, voting, sex, alcohol, military service, being tried as an adult, legal autonomy to name some of the most important)
Many cultures have used ages from 13 to 25 (maybe even outside that range) as the cutoff for “adult” for various different things, and ages between about 16 and 21 are still pretty common with a few even still being outside that range now. Most countries still have different ages for at least some of those thresholds
Most of these things have changed over time too – eg in the UK as a whole voting is now 18 but was previously 21, and you can find dozens of similar examples
18 seems to be where countries are coalescing over time as a bit of a “sensible-ish middle ground”, but there’s no real reason behind it beyond the (fairly vague) fact that at 18 most people are roughly fully grown
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