The last five thousand years have had humans living in agricultural societies, as opposed to the nomadic societies that we evolved in. Agricultural societies face massively different problems than nomadic ones. Written history is biased towards the latter part of human history, when the vast majority of it look quite different from the part that came after the invention of writing. For the record, those few tribes that still live more or less like humans evolved tend not to have a problem with warfare, because they tend not to have neighbors to fight wars with.

Also, pointing to bonobos was not an attempt to claim we are more like them than we are chimps. I simply hate chimpanzee analogies because they proves exactly nothing about human nature, and the scientists who try and glean useful insights into humans from chimps also careful these days to talk about bonobos for this very reason. We are not quite like either of them; we are somewhat like both of them. Incidentaly, chimps do less raping than bonobos and humans.


If you look at warfare from 150 years ago, it looks notably different from warfare today. Look 150 years previous to that, it looks again different. Look back far enough, and it looks completely different save for the fact there are monkeys beating each other to death with sticks and stones. And different cultures, like the Native American tribes that had a practice of counting coup for instance, had very different ideas about how to wage war than modern national entities, from rules of ethics/honor/ritual to methods to philosophies to causes belli. For this reason, I reserve skepticism for the idea that all ideas about warfare we take for granted today were always around, except that humans of some tribes decided to fight with others to resolve who knows what kind of disputes. Otherwise, why would writers like Sun Tzu and others even exist, if not to propose a different way of waging war? Intelligence may seem like a basic one, and you can bet that the first guy who started making a habit of learning his enemy's resources started winning a lot more battles. But then again, once upon a time the idea of a standing army was an innovation too (and that is something that written history did record), so who knows? Plus, there is the fact that war was invented independently in several different places. In some it might have looked like a ritualistic mob on mob duel, whereas others it might have started out with theft and escalated to raiding settlements.

Its just not a subject simple enough to warrant too many assumptions.