While this is more a question for anthropology subreddit - yes, of course it has always been a human trait. Numerous historic persons have been described as awkward. I'm just going to pick one of them:
Russian Empress Alexandra, wife of Nicholas II Romanov. She fits the ''100 years ago'' part of your question (1872-1918)
She was notoriously shy and very awkward around people. As a new Empress, brought to Russia from Germany, she failed to fit into the pompous extroverted St Petersburg society in the way one Consort should have. She spoke ''into her chin'' as Russians would describe it (probably meaning a silent speech with lack of lip movement), would evade eye contact and often wouldn't acknowledge a potential interlocutor. On top of it all, she basically didn't speak Russian, and her French (popular language among aristocracy) was reportedly awful too.
Now, this caused an effect among aristocracy - they didn't think of her as shy and weird. They thought of her as pretentious, ''holier than thou'' type. The one that thinks others are unworthy of talking with them. This absolutely doesn't mean that awkwardness wasn't a concept back then, (because this is a mistake that even we make today - i've very often thought of someone as arrogant or pretentious only to find out that it's plain shyness).
All this made her very unpopular and further distanced her from the Court and the Elite, and no doubt had a bit of influence in the course of events that followed, even if minimal.
As /u/falsh12 says, this is in many ways more of an anthropological or sociological question. You may be interested in my long answer over on /r/asksocialscience to a similar question:
Awkwardness is about not knowing, or violating, the norms. For much of human history, people were much more closely arrayed in local groups—particularly, villages of peasants. There, in most situations, people would know the rules of their village. There’d be one set of rules and everyone would know them. Sure, there’d be plenty of awkwardness when the relationship between the two people was unclear, or one person in the interaction wasn’t quite sure what the normal thing to do was: when a single young man and single young woman were talking, for instance, or a young man was unsure whether he belonged with the boys or the men, or a young couple on their wedding night not sure what comes next or when a dignitary visited and locals weren’t sure how to act. But in general, there’d be one set of norms that people would use more or less from birth. People could navigate them relatively easily.
In the village, people’s roles tend to be defined and everyone knows everyone else’s proper role. Urbanization complicates this because people have to flit between roles much more quickly. I interviewed a man who was born in a peasant village who told me he how awkward he felt every time he went with his father to the city to sell their produce—he didn’t know the social rules, didn’t know how to act, felt he was inadequately performing the expected roles. (He ended moving to the city for high school, going to university, and becoming first a teacher then a successful businessman.)
The individual norms are so specific, though, that it’s hard to go more into detail than those generalities. I wrote an answer here that talks about how awkward Melanesian women found European’s ways of having sex were. Why? Because the Europeans didn’t understand local norms about having sex, how one “properly” does it. I remember another ethnography that talked about how awkward Nuer people found the western tradition of lovers kissing on the lips to be—in Nuer culture, kissing is done between parent and child, not lovers. Awkwardness abounds in the anthropological encounter because it’s a situation specifically chosen because the anthropologist doesn’t understand the operative norms... so inevitably breaks them. There’s layers of complication, like how power fits into it all (notice it was Melanesian women and not European men who found the sex to be awkward—the European men had sex according to their norms and there’s little indication that they cared that much about local norms), but just seeing it as an uncertainty about norms or a violation of norms is a good start.
Speaking from a psychological viewpoint, the emotion "awkward" is not universal today, so there is no reason to believe that it would have been any more universal historically. Emotions can be divided into primary and secondary emotions. Primary emotions seem to be universal fairly tightly biologically rooted (usually to subcortical structures). There is not precise agreement on what the primary emotions are (the models from Ekman, Plutchik, Shaver, etc., have slightly different numbers), but the number only ranges from 5 to 15 in any of the widely accepted models. In contrast, there are countless secondary emotions that are culturally specific variants or blends of primary emotions and may not have direct analogies in other cultures. "Awkward" is in that category.
On a personal note, I have numerous Saudi students in my graduate program in clinical psychology, and when I was teaching about emotions in my biopsychology class I had one student tell me that he had been perplexed by the emotion of "awkwardness" ever since coming to the U.S. to study. There is no direct translation into Arabic (the word "embarrassed" is the closest) and so he set about trying to see if he could figure out what the emotion was by putting himself into situations that were often described as "awkward" by English speakers. It took him six months of determined effort before he felt it, and from that point on it bothered him immensely. Related to this, there is a series of research studies by Dov Cohen showing that people from honor cultures (e.g., Celtic, Arab) show downregulation of socially engaging emotions such as shame and embarrassment (to which awkwardness is related), and upregulation of socially disengaging emotions such as anger and irritation in the same circumstances. The concept of awkwardness is rooted in ambiguous social demands, which are more typical of specific cultures. If your culture has more rigid social roles or an idea that you need to defend your social position, then "awkward" situations may not be perceived.