The evidence we have is exactly the one you said: moderns humans living in conditions of scarcity. Sure, they don't resort to as dire extremes as the one I desc

The evidence we have is exactly the one you said: moderns humans living in conditions of scarcity. Sure, they don't resort to as dire extremes as the one I described. Mostly[^1]. I was simply extrapolating. But the rule of law, rules of conduct and so on are not the same as for us Westerners living the good life, nor is the degree to which they obey those laws. You just need to visit a third-world country, or look at their numbers (e.g., corruption index). I was born to those facts in my particular native hell-hole[^2], but later in life I did some book-worming to inform myself better. I can highly recommend "The Collapse of Complex Societies: New Studies in Archaeology, Book 8" (it's expensive in Amazon, but one credit in Audible). From that work: > The citizens of modern complex societies usually do not realize that we are an anomaly of history. Throughout the several million years that recognizable humans are known to have lived, the common political unit was the small, autonomous community, acting independently, and largely self-sufficient. Robert Carneiro has estimated that 99.8 percent of human history has been dominated by these autonomous local communities (1978; 219). It has only been within the last 6000 years that something unusual has emerged: the hierarchical, organized, interdependent states that are the major reference for our contemporary political experience. [^1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korowai_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korowai_people [^2] When starvation was too dire, my people would steal the neighbor's cat and eat it. It was a widespread practice.