Not intelligently aware of themselves? In what way? There was little difference between what they knew and how they acted - there was their own tribe, and there

Not intelligently aware of themselves? In what way? There was little difference between what they knew and how they acted - there was their own tribe, and there were other tribes - and people today, where you can see cliques and groups naturally form in schools and elsewhere. > epidemics that wiped out their whole tribes. These things were supremely rare. As the article notes, the rise of death by disease at scale was a direct result of higher population and density, as well as likely poorer sanitary conditions. Let us presume a disease randomly shows up and infects a tribe, killing all of them. Now what? The disease dies out. In fact, our tribal nature is in effect a preventative measure against precisely this, as it causes most human societies to develop boundaries with each other. A deadly disease survives by spreading, which is a difficult thing to do in a world of tribal societies. > Which I also think kept their population growth in check. All animal populations are kept in control by basic ecology - when there's enough food to support a larger population, the population grows; when there is not, it does not. Humans are no different (until modern times with birth control/women empowerment/etc.) > Agriculture seems to be a inevitable step for any intelligent species to take if they want to live in organized ways like societies, states and countries. This is an interesting point. Agriculture has allowed larger societies (tribes are organized societies, and good ones), but not better ones (yet). I don't find this particularly surprising - a highly refined technology or method is almost always better than a newer one, even if the newer one eventually equals and surpasses it. The gun took hundreds of years to replace the sword, the car decades to replace the horse, and today we see new forms of energy production gradually moving to replace oil. Humans and developments in human society are no different - agriculture is the only way to support larger societies, but we have yet to correct for all the problems it brings that tribal societies had long since solved.