Pinker based his claim that prehistory was extremely violent on around 20 archaeological sites spanning 14,000 years. “The only difference between then and now is that of scale,” he says.īut while some researchers may agree with Pinker that prehistoric and modern warfare are essentially the same phenomenon, they don’t necessarily agree with him that the evidence points to a long-term decline. Gronenborn says that massacres of entire communities were frequent occurrences in Europe at that time and that one of their hallmarks, judging by the human remains, was the desire to erase the victims’ identity.
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The absence of young women from the group suggested that the attackers may have kidnapped them. More than two dozen individuals were killed by blunt force instruments or arrows and dumped in a mass grave, their lower legs having been systematically broken either just before or just after death. In 2015, he and others described a massacre among Europe’s earliest farmers at a place called Schöneck-Kilianstädten in Germany, about 7,000 years ago. For him, therefore, a massacre of a couple of dozen of hunter-gatherers in Sudan around about 13,000 years ago, the earliest known example of collective violence, is relevant to a discussion of modern warfare.Īrchaeologist Detlef Gronenborn of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz, Germany, agrees. Historian and archaeologist Ian Morris of Stanford University, author of War! What Is it Good For? (2014), is among those who say that the nature of collective violence hasn’t changed much in millennia, it’s just that human groups were smaller in the past.
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Most researchers accept that there is a difference between war and interpersonal violence – and that these two things are governed by different forces – but there is disagreement over where to draw the line between them. “It’s up to researchers who study sub-state-level violence to substantiate their claims that the dynamics of such violence are relevant to the dynamics of war and, in my view, they haven’t done a great job there,” he says.
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Clauset doesn’t think it would help to add older data into the mix indeed, he thinks it would muddy the picture. In 2018, for example, computer scientist Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado Boulder crunched data on wars fought between 18 and concluded that we’d have to wait at least another century to find out. But among his critics are those who say that warfare between modern nation states, which are only a few hundred years old, has nothing in common with conflict before that time, and therefore it’s too soon to say if the supposed “long peace” we’ve been enjoying since the end of the second world war is a blip or a sustained trend. Pinker thought we could and he supported his claim of a long decline with data stretching thousands of years back into prehistory. Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature.