War: Built on Bones
Up until very recently, and even continuing today, many people believed in "the myth of the peaceful savage," as Lawrence Keeley referred to it in the subheader of his 1990s book on the topic. Essentially, before a certain point, the idea was that humans were largely peaceful. Native Americans, nomadic tribes in Africa... groups that hadn't been poisoned by civilization and lived in harmony with nature were not prone to the kind of violent conflict that seemed to plague the modern man. In this chapter, Hassett debunks this, tracing violence in the form of community on community conflict all the way back to perhaps the beginnings of communities. There wasn't previously much evidence to support this, but over time evidences of massacres started to pop up in Africa, Germany and Austria -- massacres that involved trauma to the backs of the skulls of men, women and children that were then tossed aside into bogs, or perhaps cannibalized and left deep in the caves. There a