Are human societies becoming more violent? It is difficult to imagine a point in time when an event as devastating as the dropping of the atomic bomb occurred. Even the most brutal acts committed by our ancient ancestors pale in comparison to the systematic attacks carried out by nations in the last century alone. Ongoing wars and human rights violations suggest that we are living in one of the most vicious times in history. But archaeologists who study historical violence say the evidence suggests there are no black-and-white answers.
To conclude that humans are becoming more violent than ever would require a chronology of all aggressive behavior in human history. Archaeologists have uncovered several artifacts of humanity’s violent past in the skeleton of what may have been the first murder victim some 430,000 years ago. Ancient Mesopotamian death pit It is likely that war victims and human sacrifices were held there. However, these historical fragments are still not enough to paint a complete picture.
Explains that the further back we go back into the past, the harder it is to assess violence and murder. Linda Fibigeran archaeologist at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, who studies conflict in early human history.
Ruins alone do not tell the complete story. It’s hard to find enough evidence to know whether humans in a particular era were violent, or whether someone’s violent death was an isolated event. Even if an autopsy of an ancient hominin suggests a brutal death, it cannot reveal the killer’s motive. For example, some ritual acts were laced with violence as people were sacrificed as offerings to the gods.
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“I don’t think prehistory was forever in a state of war and conflict. But given the skeletal evidence and the proportion of people with violent trauma, I don’t think most people knew about violence. , they would have known someone who had experienced violence,” Fibiger said. She also points out that perceptions of whether we lived in violent times can change depending on whether people in the past considered the act a crime.
If perception is a factor, we could be We live in the most peaceful era ever. In his 2011 book The better angels of our nature: Why violence has decreased, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker theorized that at the time, small hunter-gatherer groups were the most violent and had the highest death rates from war. As communities settled into a more organized state, they became more “civilized” and were able to develop skills of empathy, reasoning, and self-control.
“We like to believe that we have become much smarter, more rational, more civilized,” he says. dean falk, an evolutionary anthropologist at Florida State University. “But I don’t think everything is fine right now.” Falk, previously analysis of evidence Pinker made a presentation, but it turned out that he did not take into account population size His calculations take into account different communities. This may have inflated war mortality rates in hunter-gatherer societies when compared to state-based societies. And while a large proportion of small-scale societies may have died in the conflict, Falk argues that this says more about the attacks they suffered than their own acts of violence.
When Falk included absolute mortality (the number of deaths depending on the size of a particular population) in his calculations, he found that population size, not the type of civilizational structure, determines whether a society loses residents to a disaster. It turns out that it is. war. Additionally, the rate of annual war deaths was lower in state societies, but the larger the population, the higher the annual number of war deaths, Faulk said. “This may have something to do with having big brains and the technology to invent more effective weapons to kill each other.”
Nor is there a law that says we are on a linear path toward a more or less violent society.New research published in this month’s journal nature human behavior It suggests that human violence has increased and decreased throughout history. Giacomo BenatiAn archaeologist at Spain’s University of Barcelona and co-author of a new study says analyzing historical trends in violence can be biased by focusing on historical battle records and polarized narratives of the ancient world. It is said that there are many
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His new study, one of the largest archaeological studies of early human violence, seeks to circumvent that bias by examining large numbers of bones. Benati and his team analyzed 3,539 human bones from people who lived in seven Middle Eastern countries between 12,000 BC and 400 BC for evidence of cranial trauma or weapons-related wounds.
Fibiger, who was not involved in the study, said the study was particularly interesting because it attempts to contextualize what is happening. Large datasets of human skeletons allowed them to link traumatic deaths to ongoing conflicts, economics, and climate-driven unequal distribution of resources and wealth. “By bringing these together, we get a better idea of people’s lives and what escalated conflicts and disrupted relationships,” says Fibiger.
Interpersonal violence (murder, torture, slavery, and other cruel punishments) peaked during the Stone Age, between 4,500 and 3,300 BC, Benati and his co-authors concluded. High rates of violence may be related to the formation of political units vying for control, which may have escalated local conflicts into larger, organized conflicts.
Benati said the most surprising finding was the steady decline in violence from the early to middle Bronze Age, which he thought may be related to rising standards of living. “Examination of thousands of photographs of unearthed human bones reveals how people lived before modern medicine.” [did] It doesn’t look pretty,” he says. “It was short-lived and they had to live with constant illness and pain.”
Violence rates seem to have increased again from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age. A drier climate may have made people more violent.The arrival of the Iron Age 300 years of drought This contributed to crop shortages and widespread starvation. This water shortage would have stressed local communities and led to competition for resources. Fibiger points out that this possessiveness over limited resources, whether land or food, is a universal motivator for the violence we still see today. Furthermore, given the current deterioration of climate conditions, how people have responded to past climate extremes may inform how they will respond to future instability. said Benati. For example, climate change could once again lead to a prolonged period of violence.
Given our bloody record in conflict management, archaeologists are divided over whether humans can live in societies free of violence. Fibiger believes that people are not inherently violent but can be forced into situations where they need to protect themselves and their livelihoods. She believes that humans can do better by learning from the violence of the past. Falk is less optimistic. She states that given that we have the same capacity for violence as our ancient ancestors, it could wipe out our species. The only difference now is that we now have access to more lethal weapons and more organized warfare. “For proof, just turn on the TV and watch the evening news.”
