StCirq

I'm not so sure, Fuzz, that there was an overriding sense of cooperation when folks were banding together to kill a woolly mammoth. There were warring tribes, even back then. People wanted to, and did, kill each other over reindeer herds and access to riverbanks to catch fresh fish and shelters to keep their families safe and warm in winters. I'm not sure it was all that rosy, even tens of thousands of years ago. I read a lot about prehistory, and it wasn't a cakewalk. There's a wonderful book called Le Guide Secret du Périgord that chronicles atrocities from 30,000 years ago until recently.

Yes, when people claimed land and began to grow things, the tension grew. Because people had PROPERTY - stuff that belonged to them, or sort of, if it didn't beong to the feudal lord (and isn't that still a major source of all the conflicts in the world? Grown-up kindergarteners yelling "It's MINE!" ). The concept of property, ownership, must have changed everything, I think. And there were always people struggling to survive, but not in contexts that we can understand today when every modern Western supermarket is jammed with 900 varieties of cereal - it was can you nab enough wild boar and reindeer and grow enough wheat to keep you alive through the winter? Depending on your holdings, maybe yes, maybe no. And there WASN'T lots of room to avoid people - except for places like here in the Périgord where there were resources galore, you took your chances going outside the food box to be sure you could eat, stay warm, and thrive. But we have always been deep in forests that make it easy for us to hide.

But I don't think it was ever as simple as if you didn't like it, you could leave. Sure, you could, but that posed all kinds of logistical hazards and uprootings of your established life. Once you had an agricultural society in place, the nomads were a thing of history except in small part. And then there were established villages and towns and organizational factions that "governed" how you behaved, and you either did or didn't, and the various factions agreed or disagreed and went after each other, by which time weapons of killing had been established...and on and on and on. In some places a feudal system reigned and was successful; other places had more democratic régimes where people had more liberties and fewer taxations and limitations.

I can only deduce that we have been programmed to kill off our enemies from the start in efforts to survive in the ways that WE want to survive, and that at this point, with billions of people on earth there are so many different factions with so many different wants and needs it's impossible to sort them out. We are just ballooning toward a who-knows-what guess as to what will happen next. I have a dire sense of absolute loss of control over the world in general.