Philosophers have romanticized this period as the “state of nature”, and we’re usually told it was a time of desperation and bloodshed. But does the evidence back them up? That’s what we aim to examine here.
If we can find clues as to what life was like before the state, we will know what most of human history was like. From the emergence of Homo sapiens around 300,000 BC up until around 3,000 BC(only about 5,000 years ago!), people were stateless.