Re prehistory. If you are talking about Northern Europe we are talking up to the pre-Roman iron age for “pre-history”. Of course, that only defines literacy levels. Technology levels are very different – Old stone age, New stone age and bronze age are increasingly sophisticated in technologies – “new stone age” tools are very sophisticated (look up “Otzi the Ice Man” for an excellent example – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi). Old stone age was by definition less sophisticated and less civilised – the population was very small at the time. Bronze age was incredibly sophisticated and was the period when huge and numerous monuments were created – Stonehenge “henges”, etc. Think about the level of sophistication in society to be able to organise, and fund (i.e. produce and co-ordinate the food and time needed to allow your workforce to be away from subsistence activities for the time to create the henge). Of course it is a moot point whether that sophistication was applied to warfare – for instance, is there any evidence that large scale warfare was a thing at the time – assuming there were lower populations and there was less pressure on the land etc. Anthropology has something to say about this – and tends to infer that large scale warfare wasn’t common in tribal societies, not because it couldn’t be done, but because it was wasteful. Of course, once a prehistoric society has gone beyond tribal in nature, then anything is off. Look how warlike and organised the early Mesopotamian civilisations were – and I can imagine that in the few decades before they discovered writing they were probably only marginally less martial.

So I think I am saying, just because we don’t have the written records that describe the way prehistoric society worked, there is plenty of evidence from archaeology and anthropology, as well as late-bronze-age literate societies (such as that of the biblical Kings David and Solomon) that they were equal in sophistication and resourcefulness to what was out there once writing was discovered. We will have to infer a lot of things simply because of the lack of historical record, but I am pushing for something that represents an intelligent and organised society, rather than a few near-apes running around clubbing each other with mammoth bone, which I think is a bit of an unjustified stereotype. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!

It sounds weird, but if you remove the fantastical element, then the scenario described by Robert E Howard in his Conan stories is something like, in a way, what I personally would imagine for prehistoric society.

Of course, if you want to go for a hunter-gatherer, tribal, crude level of lifestyle – before farming, before weaving, before the discovery of copper and even gold, then the Old Stone Age is where you are at, at the very dawn of prehistory, long before civilisation was a gleam in a neanderthal’s eye. But even then… look at the cave paintings in Trois-Freres (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Trois-Fr%C3%A8res). Just because technology was simple, doesn’t mean it was crude, and it most certainly doesn’t apply a low level of intellect. Also, we have to bear in mind the limitations of anthropology. Studying hunter-gatherer societies hidden in remote areas in the modern age, while giving us insight into how hunter-gather societies work, doesn’t necessarily translate directly if we are talking about a hunter-gatherer society that wasn’t restricted to remote locations, but was the common and dominant form of society at the time.

Cave-man rights! I tells ya…!