From Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis' A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution:
It has been conventional since Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan to attribute the maintenance of social order to states. But for at least 95% of the time that biologically modern humans have existed, our ancestors have somehow fashioned a system of governance that without the assistance of governments avoided the chaos of the Hobbesian state of nature sufficiently to become by far the most enduring of social orders ever (Bowles and Gintis 2011, 110).
Every time someone uses state of nature theory to make a point, I want to cringe, and I have to gnash my teeth to get through it. Whatever state-of-nature theorists have attributed to human origins have been proven wrong. Really ever since Darwin, scholars should have accepted that human groups have had a self-ordering character throughout human history, recorded and otherwise, without any need for Hobbes' leviathan, or Locke's social contract.
State of nature theory is blantantly fictional, and hurts out appreciation for human society's self-ordering nature. With a bit of biology, we can do much better than it, and start talking about early human social orders as they actually were rather than as we wrongly imagined them to be.