Gat spends quite a lot of time on the reasons which impel humans to war and what he comes up with are essentially political concerns: access to land, resources, mates and security. Classic grand-strategy statecraft stuff. Even in very early societies.
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A definition of politics that holds out until the polity has a state are going to be excessively restricted when applied to the past. The consensus of medievalists, for instance, is that much of medieval Europe was a non-state society. Did 1150 France not have politics?
Certainly, the warfare - especially small scale local warfare - of the Middle Ages was often not much more complex than a man getting his near family and their retainers together to go fight. Defining that as 'pre-political' seems silly to me.
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Of course, most of the sort of warfare we have evidence for, even in the pre-historic period, involves groups larger than a single nuclear family. I'd say the decision of a 100-person tribal unit with c. 30 warriors to go cattle-raiding is political in nature.
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I think Gat shows very clearly the continuity between low level decision making around violence and larger scale warfare, so I absolutely accept the idea that there is no clear break point where a different ‘political’ process emerges. It suggests that we should...
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