We don't know what ancient traditional societies were like exactly, since only so much can be deduced from bones, the remains of fires, and bits of flint. But we do know about the many pre-state, traditional, societies that existed while Marx was still alive. Even though he never saw any personally, he was right when he said they were "simple, barbarous, and patriarchal".

They were barbarous because they were illiterate and innumerate. Without the skills of reading, writing, counting, and measuring, you can't have money, deeds, written laws, maps, reciepts, or even religious texts. So property is whatever you can physically hold on to. There are no written treaties, agreements, or hierarchies, so being the biggest, most lethal badass counts for a lot. That's why many of those cultures like the Maori, Massai, Cheyenne, Iroquois, Zulu, and Yanomamo were warrior societies.

They were also patriarchal in that there were specific gender roles that generally favored the men except for that getting killed in a battle part. Women processed hides or cloth, collected the food and processed it, did any farming, cared for the children, fetched firewood and water, and did any other scut work that needed done. Men hunted, fished, made the devices of war, conducted the religion and politics, trained the young braves, and if they had livestock which they owned incidentally just like their wives, they guarded them. In the last illustration dude is chilling in the shade while the women are weaving, like always.

If you study the anthropology and history of traditional societies like the ones I mentioned, you will see that greed, treachery, scarcity, and domination in some form were present in their lives, since they were humans just like we are. If you want to study a semi-literate traditional warrior society that is fighting the modern world tooth and nail, check out the Taliban.