The First Genocide

The first crime with a weapon must have been a major surprise and even incomprehensible to both the perpetrator(s) as well as the victim. The weaker male(s) who had killed an alpha male first would have found it so easy as opposed to the fist fights and wrestling engaged in till then. Not only would the act take such a short time to complete but it was also so decisive. A large stone smashed on the head of the sleeping stronger alpha male would immediately have reduced the powerful giant into a helpless cripple incapable of any fight thereafter, if it was not killed outright. The full comprehension of what had happened would have taken sometime to sink in. . The weaker male(s) who committed the crime may have run away in fear assuming that their victim would come back after them to punish. But they would soon have realized that the alpha male could torment them no longer. Also the family of the first homicide victim would not have understood clearly what happened. Seeing that their protector was no longer capable of protecting them they may have drifted away to join other families nearby
The weaker males may have tried the same thing on other alpha males nearby with some success. But these successes would have fixed the criminal act in the minds of the weaker males as the solution to all their problems. They would have quickly understood that this was a fast way for supremacy. This first understanding of the devastating effect of the killing act should have jump started the acceleration of development of the hominid brain.
But not all attempts would have been successful. Many of them would have failed due to the sheer fear suffered by the weaker males in the presence of the alpha male. Consequently the alpha males would have caught on to the idea of weapons. Being bigger and stronger their adoption of the killing weapon would have terrorized the weaker males. Now the balance would have shifted back into the favor of the alpha males decisively with the weaker ones threatened with annihilation. The hominid brain which had literally woken up just then by the initial act of homicide, now would have begun the next phase of faster development, this time also in the suffering and terrified weaker males. The weaker males by virtue of the rapidly developing brain function would have quickly deduced that even the most powerful alpha male can be overcome if tackled by enough number of weaker males. Unlike the time before weapon use, even the brute strength of an alpha male would have been no match for the coordinated attacks of a few weaker males who can now pounce on it from different sides with their stone cutting and pounding tools. They only needed to smash its skull or slash its throat or stomach. The same thing could also be done stealthily in the night when the alpha male was asleep. Thereafter their task of getting rid of the alpha male was pretty simple.
What was till now a localized phenomenon of conflict between males in restricted territory, would have begun to spread farther. The weaker males finding that they could quickly get rid a lot of alpha males over a large area might have initiated the first large scale genocide in the hominid history. They would have begun killing more for the pleasure of it as they found that they were now virtually unstoppable. The hominid society would have begun falling apart as the basic family unit around the alpha male collapsed. The females and children could have got no protection and would have been at the mercy of the marauding males and the ever present plains predators. The hominid populations would have begun plummeting creating a serious crisis. As the genocide spread in ever expanding cycles throughout the hominid population the species would have started the countdown to self destruction. The entire scenario should have played out in a few generations. Also the genocide would have come in waves with periods of calm between as the violence reached a climax and then temporarily abated.

The waves of genocide would have driven the populations to the brink of extinction before they bounced back again and again. They only factor that may have prevented extinction may have been that the main cause of the extinction was homicide and hence when the population fell below a threshold the cause would have abated. This type of violent stress would have been the stimulant for the explosion in human brain development for survival. Human intelligence had to race ahead of the devastating effects of the killing hominid with the murder weapon bent on killing everyone other than himself. The resilience of the human mind can be inferred from the result of this first thriller when human intelligence managed to slow the genocide and ensured the survival of the species. How this could have been achieved is a fascinating topic for detailed studies of the human brain and society.