Graeber / Wengrow 505: "While human beings have always been capable of physically attacking one another (and it's difficult to find examples of societies where no one ever attacks anyone else, under any circumstances), there's no actual reason to assume that war has always existed. Technically, war refers not just to organized violence but to a kind of contest between two clearly demarcated sides. As Raymond Kelly has adroitly pointed out, it's based on a logical principle that's by no means natural or self-evident, which states that major violence involves two teams, and any member of one team treats all members of the other as equal targets."
506: "There is nothing particularly primordial about such arrangements; certainly, there is no reason to believe they are in any sense hardwired into the human psyche. On the contrary, it's almost invariably necessary to employ some combination of ritual, drugs, and psychological techniques to convince people, even adolescent males, to kill and injure each other in such systematic yet indiscriminate ways."
"[F]or most of human history, no one saw much reason to do such things; or if they did, it was rate. Systematic studies of the Palaeolithic record offer little evidence of warfare in this specific sense."
"Ethnography provides plenty of examples of what could best be described as play war: either with non-deadly weapons or, more often, battles involving thousands on each side where the number of casualties after a day's 'fighting' amount to perhaps two or three."
However, lest we celebrate too early, "there is an increasing amount of archaeological evidence for outright massacres, such as those that took place among Neolithic village dwellers in central Europe after the end of the last Ice Age"
506-7: "War did not become a constant of human life after the adoption of farming; indeeed, long periods of time exist in which it appears to have been successfully abolished. Yet it had a stubborn tendency to reappear, [sometimes] many generations later."
Question: "Was there a relationship between external warfare and the internal loss of freedoms that opened the way, first to systems of ranking and then later on to large-scale systems of domination, like those we've discussed in the later chapters of this book: the first dynastic kingdoms and empires, such as those of the Maya, Shang, or Inca?" (507)