[Aunche]

The people who resorted to eating cultivated grass seeds had more imminent problems to worry about before ambitions about being warlords. That occurred a few thousand years later.

> which in turn forces their neighbors to do the same to survive

Until gunpowder, tribal societies were at least a strong as their hierarchical contemporaries. The Huns destroyed the Roman Empire and Mongols conquered China.

[Manuel_D]

The Huns were not hunter gatherers. They were pastoralists that had access to metal work and other manufacturers goods from their sedentary neighbors.

[Aunche]

Pastoralism is a logical evolution of hunting after animals became domesticated. My point is that you didn't necessarily need a large hierarchical society to fend off against one.

[Manuel_D]

The Huns and Mongols absolutely did have large hierarchical societies, though. The Mongol army had a decimal system organizing forces into groups of 10, 100, 1,000, and 10,000 men. This is about as explicitly hierarchical as it gets.