Perhaps I was not clear enough above, but it was never my intention to imply that prehistoric humanity was the 'libertopia' we are working for at present. My intention was to theoretically inspect the assumption that prehistoric humanity was necessarily violent - something evidently not worth doing - without doing the footwork of digging up some facts. Now, because of the nature of prehistoric society, most of what we can do to gain information about that time period lies in observing the societies around us that live in a manner similar to the way humanity lived in the time in question. As you say, theory must always bow to evidence, so here it is. (Cue not only the bemoaning of using wikipedia as a source; but clearly the information is from a state institution so must be false.)
"Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have non-hierarchical, egalitarian social structures....Thus, full-time leaders, bureaucrats, or artisans are rarely supported by these societies. In addition to social and economic equality in Hunter gatherer societies there is often though not always sexual parity as well."
"At the 1966 "Man the Hunter" conference, anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore suggested that egalitarianism was one of several central characteristics of nomadic hunting and gathering societies because mobility requires minimization of material possessions throughout a population; therefore, there was no surplus of resources to be accumulated by any single member. Other characteristics Lee and DeVore proposed were flux in territorial boundaries as well as in demographic composition."
Assuming the egalitarian absence of hierarchy is not an aspect of societies centered around violence, this alone should be enough for us to consider the thought of prehistoric humanity as violent as suspect. Also, since we are in the habit of extrapolating information about childhood from adult life, we can see it is likely that violence was NOT an inherent part of the upbrining of prehistoric children. The little information I found in my cursory search on children in hunter-gatherer societies bears this out.
"Children were very well behaved and treated kindly by their parents and group[16]. Children spent much of the day playing with each other and are not segregated by sex, neither sex is trained to be submissive or fierce, and neither sex is restrained from expressing the full breadth of emotion that seems inherent in the human spirit."
Something I though of as I was typing up the above has to do with information gleaned from 1113. At one point in the piece Stef was reading, the author mentions how abuse of children stunts the children's psychological development. If we are to assume that violence has been inherent for the entirety of Homo Sapiens' existence, when would these regions whose growth was hampered have developed? Certainly someone arguing for the violence inherent in humanity would not argue they came from before Homo Sapiens; 1) because humanity's large brain size is part of what differentiates it from its ancestors, and 2) by opening the door to inquiry that far open, the proposer allows evidence against widespread violence to come in from all of humanity's ancestors. This would allow us to observe if any or even a portion of the world's other animals, with which humanity shares common ancestors, act with widespread violence. Since fish, birds, cats, whales, etc. are all exceptionally tame compared to the slaughter of 'civilized' humanity, I don't think this would be a path of argument the proponent would want to go down.
Daniel
P.S. It should be noted that the piece linked above on Hunter-Gatherer societies gives a warning against generalizing too much. This is something I do not think I have done, as I was fully willing to accept in my previous post that a portion of prehistoric society may have been violent. The warning, of course, works both ways.
Always remember to keep TEDE ALARA and DYODD.