Vegan Cavemen?

Continuing on from my discussion of effectively emulating a society in my previous post, I have had this idea floating around in my head for a while now.

Essentially, you start off with a bunch of cavemen under your control. Well, perhaps control isn't really the right word - you're more of an observer, a deity of sorts. These little cavemen go about their business, doing what they do to survive. But you can intervene to influence the young society's beliefs and outlooks. So, if you want to make a tribe of bloodthirsty savages, you 'reward' them when they kill something (including each other). You bestow gifts on the members of their society that you feel are closest to your intentions, and the rest of the tribe grows envious and attempts to emulate them.

The point is, you're manipulating the behaviour of the tribe. You're not telling them 'go eat' but instead punishing (or rewarding) them for eating a particular something. If you give the flu to every guy that eats meat, the rest of the tribe well eventually figure out, 'Well, maybe we shouldn't eat meat?'. And then you reward the most die-hard of vegetarians with healthy children or bountiful crops. And this level of control would be really precise - you could make them wield only a particular type of weapon or favour particular colours, for example. It's a game of positive and negative reinforcement, essentially.

But the kicker would be that you wouldn't just control one tribe at a time. You'd have an entire ecosystem to play with. Multiple tribes and even animals that you could influence over the generations to your own particular ends. Want a tribe of pacifists? Done. Set them against your bloodthirsty tribe? Go ahead. Guide the sabretooth cat's evolution so that they become the size of houses? Try it.

It's a little bit Black and White (perhaps very much Black and White), a little bit The Sims. And these are just a few of the ideas that I had. It's complicated, sure, but it'd be fun at least. One idea I had to expand it would to be to separate it all out to different planets as well, but that'd probably be over-complicating things. I had grand visions of guiding the competing civilisations to violently opposing outlooks on life and then just sitting back and watching them murder each other. I can't imagine there being a point or goal - perhaps survival alone would be motivation? Perhaps once your civilisations reach the Space Age you could download other people's civs and set them against each other?