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Indon comments on Ethical Inhibitions - Less Wrong
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Strictly speaking they don't need to be; they "just" need to be common enough among human cultures for that to exert distinguishable selection pressure, and successful enough that the groups that come up with the idea don't end up autodarwinating. Though the latter is group selection pressure of a kind, too.
I'd rather stay agnostic on whether or not this is the case; we have very little reliable data on culture under non-marginal paleolithic conditions. I haven't heard of any conclusive skeletal evidence for war in that era (murder yes, war no), but this isn't my field so I could easily be missing some.
Well, it's not conclusive evidence by any means, but I did note that we have no hominoid relatives; they're all extinct with a capital E. To me, that implies something more than just us being better at hunting-gathering.
And if we, as a species, did exterminate one or more other hominid species, then it seems a small leap of logic to conclude we did the same to each other whenever similar circumstances came up.
Two points. First, the extinction of nonhuman hominids happened at about the same time as a more general die-out of megafauna. Overhunting by H. sapiens is one popular explanation for why that happened, but it's not the only one, and if one of the alternatives ends up being true (or partly true) then it could easily have affected our hominid relatives as well.
Second, species inadvertently cause each other to go extinct all the time without going to war with each other, just by competing for a niche; consider any of the introduced species that have been causing ecological problems recently. Again, this could easily have happened to our hominid relatives over the timescales we're discussing.
These ideas, of course, aren't mutually exclusive.
Remember, different hominid species were, y'know, different species, with different (apparently suboptimal) adaptations. So them getting exterminated is more likely in any case.