"I am not sure there is that much evidence to support this general thread that humans were peaceful and cooperative up until agriculture." This is actually the prevailing theory in anthropology today and there's tons of evidence to support it from a wide variety of disciplines. The fact that you seem to be unaware of that doesn't make it any less true.
As you may recall, I didn’t say that humans don’t have natural inclinations towards hierarchy. I said that intentional suppression of those inclinations was a central adaptation of human evolution and development that allowed our ancient ancestors to survive. It’s something that we still see in all modern forager bands today.
"FOR 5000 years, humans have grown accustomed to living in societies dominated by the privileged few. But it wasn’t always this way. For tens of thousands of years, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were widespread. And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organised ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.
Decision-making was decentralised and leadership ad hoc; there weren’t any chiefs. There were sporadic hot-blooded fights between individuals, of course, but there was no organised conflict between groups. Nor were there strong notions of private property and therefore any need for territorial defence. These social norms affected gender roles as well; women were important producers and relatively empowered, and marriages were typically monogamous.
Keeping the playing field level was a matter of survival."
In fact, our ancestors have for the most part been “fiercely egalitarian”, intolerant of any form of inequality. While hunter-gatherers accepted that people had different skills, abilities and attributes, they aggressively rejected efforts to institutionalise them into any form of hierarchy.
So what happened to cause such a profound shift in the human psyche away from egalitarianism? The balance of archaeological, anthropological and genomic data suggests the answer lies in the agricultural revolution, which began roughly 10,000 years ago.
