Actually, there's some additional information you may want to consider.

> I've reached the Predynastic Period (5500 - 3100
> BC), and it occurs to me what we today blandly
> cover as ...." beginning in 5500 BC we find
> evidence of organized, permanent settlements
> focused around agriculture."... must have been a
> huge struggle between the hierarchy that "ran"
> Hunts and the folks that wanted to expand
> agriculture.

5500 BC is only the rise of walled towns in Egypt (there are Levant and Harappan villages that are a thousand years older than that.)

From what we know of the lifestyle, pre-village times, people lived in small bands that followed certain food crops and animals. They would have 'seasonal homes' rather than a permanent settlement (they didn't dig latrines and they tended to just throw stuff on a trash heap (midden), so after 4 months or so a camping site was smelly and trashy.)

At the end of the last ice age, the climate changed drastically and water resources shrank. Deserts widened, and animals moved into watered valleys. Humans followed them there and groups became involved with each other more frequently. Territorial rights had to be negotiated, as well as kinship and marriage rules.


> Imagine for a moment you are the hunt leader,
> carrying on in the tradition you’ve had passed
> down from your father’s father’s fathers. Meantime
> someone is recruiting your younger hunters to dig
> in dirt with sticks. What honor can a man get
> fighting dirt clods?

This is a modern notion. Honor rules (speaking anthropologically) varied from culture to culture and hunting wasn't an honored profession. EVERYbody hunted. You had to, if you wanted to live. Women tended to be more involved in the gathering since it was easier to gather acorns while tending an infant than it was to go out hunting gazelles with the same infant.

> The group is split on the issue, some wanting to
> settle down more and others wanting to continue to
> wander the greater area “as we’ve always done.”

In which case, they would have simply split. No hard feelings.

In the pre-tribal state and tribal states, people simply did this. They didn't have an organized form of priesthood and leadership as we know it today. There were people who "talked with spirits" but not a formal religion. If you wanted to go on a hunt with Oluggg, you went. If you didn't like your kin, you could just walk away and take your family or go live with another group if you could get them to accept you.

In any case, orthodoxy requires a civilization with larger towns as a unified group. It requires government and religious structure and a system of enforcing that.

Some of the Levantine sites, perhaps, or even the Harappan ones would be the first "civilized quarrels."