No, I'm saying that once the agricultural revolution comes to a continent it impacts the social systems there, whether or not every person is an agriculturalist. Dominance hierarchies spread rapidly because they are so disruptive.
“In a demographic simulation that Omkar Deshpande, Marcus Feldman and I conducted at Stanford University, California, we found that, rather than imparting advantages to the group, unequal access to resources is inherently destabilising and greatly raises the chance of group extinction in stable environments.
Counterintuitively, the fact that inequality was so destabilising caused these societies to spread by creating an incentive to migrate in search of further resources. The rules in our simulation did not allow for migration to already-occupied locations, but it was clear that this would have happened in the real world, leading to conquests of the more stable egalitarian societies — exactly what we see as we look back in history."
It is a verified and well accepted fact that although sedentism allowed the population to explode, in part because women had a child every other year, rather than every 4 years as is common for foragers, agriculture was devastating to our health and to the rise of inequality.
“Because somebody had to have control over surplus food, it became necessary to divide society into roles that supported this hierarchy. The roles of an administrator, a servant, a priest, and a soldier were invented. The soldier was especially important because agriculture was so unsustainable compared to hunting and gathering. The fickleness of agriculture ironically encouraged more migration into neighboring lands in search of more resources and warfare with neighboring groups. Capturing slaves was also important since farming was hard work, and more people were working in these new roles.
This division of labor and social inequality had very real consequences. For instance, while the majority of people had disastrous health compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, the skeletons of Mycenean royalty had better teeth and were three inches taller than their subjects. Chilean mummies from A.D. 1000 had a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease than commoners.”
In 7000 BC the world population was only about 10 million. You've got low population density, ample natural resources, and social groups that use cooperation both within and without of the tribe as a survival strategy. We know that Plaeolithic tribes traded members to prevent inbreeding so you've got family in most of your neighboring tribes. What exactly are they fighting about? Oh, that's right, they aren't. There is zero archeological evidence of mass violence of any sort before 13,000 years ago and most of it is from 8,000 years ago or later.
“According to cultural anthropologist and ethnographer Raymond C. Kelly, the earliest hunter-gatherer societies of Homo erectus population density was probably low enough to avoid armed conflict. The development of the throwing-spear, together with ambush hunting techniques, made potential violence between hunting parties very costly, dictating cooperation and maintenance of low population densities to prevent competition for resources. This behavior may have accelerated the migration out of Africaof H. Erectus some 1.8 million years ago as a natural consequence of conflict avoidance.”
This is exactly what animals do as well. Mammals in particular are highly adept at preventing and avoiding violent conflict with others of their species and in keeping it non-lethal when they do, except in very particular sets of circumstances.
"Chapter 23, The Evolution of Agonism noted, “As we shall see, unrestrained aggression (the last category in Figure 23.1) is exceedingly rare among mammals. An important implication of this fact is that any claim that escalated, unrestrained fighting is species-typical in humans must be strongly justified, rather than simply assumed a priori, as such a claim flies in the face of a well-documented mammalian pattern of restrained agonism."
“As De Waal further explains, “I am not trying to ignore the role of aggression and competition in understanding primate and human social interactions. My perspective, however, is that affiliation, cooperation, and social tolerance associated with long-term mutual benefits form the core of social group living.” (p. 108).”
This is kind of my area of expertise and I could do this all day, countering your “everyone knows” assertions that aren’t actually supported by facts with quotes from experts and stories that I've already written, but how about you stop making me do all the work and actually read what I've already linked to you? Then we can talk further.
