alt Hacker News>We lived as egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years before that.
Only if you consider intra-group egalitarianism of tribal hunter gatherer societies. But tribes would constantly go to war with each other in search of expanding to better territories with more resources, and the defeated tribe would have its men killed or enslaved, and the women bred to expand the tribe population.
So you forgot that part that involved all the killing, enslavement and rape, but other than that, yes, the victorious tribes were quite egalitarian.
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> and the defeated tribe would have its men killed or enslaved, and the women bred to expand the tribe population.
I’m not aware of any archaeological evidence of massacres during the paleolithic. Which archaeological sites would support the assertions you are making here?
Sure, nobody is claiming that hunter gatherers were saints. Just because they lived in egalitarian clans, it doesn’t mean that they didn’t occasionally do bad things.
But one key differentiator is that they didn’t have the logistics to have soldiers. With no surplus to pay anyone, there was no way build up an army, and with no-one having the ability to tell others to go to war or force them to do so, the scale of conflicts and skirmishes were a lot more limited.
So while there might have been a constant state of minor skirmishes, like we see in any population of territorial animals, all-out totalitarian war was a rare occurrence.