"even the very first edition of Unix in ~1971 had tap (an early ancestor of tar) [1] which saved & restored filenames, mtimes, modes, and owner info. You could argue that a tp/tar archive is a primitive packaging system"

I'd definitely count that as an early packaging system if it had all that metadata with it. So, that pushes it back to 1971 unless a non-UNIX machine had an equivalent before that. Likely a business mainframe or academic machine.