Azar Gat wrote a brilliant series of papers on this topic about 15 years ago. They are probably still floating around the web somewhere, but I can’t find them easily.
HGs were generally only *capable *of skirmishes. In most parts of the world a big HG tribe was just a few hundred people, but people lived almost exclusively in family bands of 3-20 individuals. Those bands might come together in tribal meetings a few times a year, but that was dependent on seasonal food surpluses, it wasn’t a time to put together an army.
IOW, when you spend most of your life living in a group of less than two dozen people, you can; do anything but skirmish because you can’t raise an army to go on a campaign.
Not directly, no. HGs maintained their population primarily through infanticide. Adult starvation seems to have been completely unknown. The interesting point that Gat raised was that the need for effective warfare capability favoured female infanticide, because that produced lots of fit (and expendable) young men who could defend the resources of the tribe, while simultaneously restricting the capacity for unstustainable population growth.
Almost exclusively from outside. If you ignore infanticide, Intra-societal homicide rates, as far as we can tell, were probably no higher than the modern US.
I’ve only seen summary information on this, but the men do suffer the brunt of deaths from warfare. Women and children were routinely killed in attacks, but men were more likely to be killed because men were always the ones doing the attacking, and were the primary defenders as well.
No idea.
Your premise is flawed. Because of selective infanticide, men outnumber women in HG societies, by very significant margins. Amongst Australian Aborigines there were around 120 men for every 100 women. Amongst Eskimos around 160 men for every 100 women.
Most societies dealt with that by only permitting men to marry late in life. The high death rate of young men meant that the balance tipped in favour of females over time. Amongst Australian Aborigines, a common custom was that young men could only marry widows with no dependent children. IOW young men were restricted to provably infertile or menopausal women.
Polygamy was common enough for the older men, but it was caused by a shortage of men of marriageable age, not a shortage of men generally.
I’ve never heard of it happening. Enemy women were raped, and were often held prisoner for some time, but they were never permanently enslaved or married.
That also makes sense once you realise that these people were already taking the extreme steps of killing their own female children to *prevent *population growth and an overabundance of women. It would be counterproductive to then go and obtain women from somewhere else. From both an evolutionary and sociological perspective, it would be much more sensible to simply allow more of their own girls to live.
You also have the problem of how you physically could hold a HG. The land is sparsely populated and they are able to survive comfortably without anything but their bare hands. Short of chaining them up permanently, there is no way to prevent them form simply walking home.
Agricultural societies kept some sort of control over slaves because an escaped slave was easily found and there was no food or shelter available to them if they escaped. Those controls don’t exist for HGs.