We Are Living In the Least Violent Time in Human History

So why does it not feel that way?

Photo by Valentin Salja on Unsplash

*This article originally appeared in the Grim Historian on November 9th, 2023. Despite what the fearmongers would like you to believe, violence in the U.S. continues to drop.

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Historians study past violence through paper and ink, but anthropologists study violence through the very marrow of its victims.

And bones rarely lie.

The bones of truth in this tale are 15 skeletons found in the 5000-year-old mass grave at Koszyce, southern Poland. Each was killed by a blow to the top of the head, most likely with a stone axe.

Researchers suspect they were killed execution-style because the skeletons lacked parry fractures — defense injuries sustained to the upper limbs and forearms. When someone sees a fist or weapon coming at them, their natural inclination is to hold up their arms to protect their face. Therefore, the absence of parry fractures usually indicates the victim was not killed in a fight.

More revealing, anthropologists discovered through genome sequencing that many of the victims were related. These genetic relations explain why bodies were placed next to their closest kin — mothers cradling children, cousins side by side, and siblings in death’s last embrace.

Unraveling ancestry, kinship, and violence in a Late Neolithic mass grave. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | Creative Commons 4.0

Disturbingly, only one male adult was found in the grave. Anthropologists are left to conclude the unthinkable — women and children were massacred while the men were away. Typically, women were valued as war bounties in most prehistoric power struggles over resources. But these women were executed instead of enslaved.

Was this Bronze Age murder a revenge killing? We will never know. But one thing is certain. The Koszyce mass grave is not the only imprint of human savagery.

Arguably, one of the most famous examples of the human propensity for violence is the Talheim Death Pits. This 7000-year-old mass grave holds 26 adults and children, most of which contain skeletons with mutilated skulls and broken legs — signs of torture before their deaths.

These death pits are found all over the world. Their contents are a grisly testament to the senseless violence humans are capable of and disabuse the glorification of the “noble savage.”

We can thank Jean Jacque Rousseau for this noble savage nonsense. In the eighteenth century, Rousseau romanticized our pre-civilization ancestors as pure, virtuous beings living in harmony with nature and free from sin.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) by Allan Ramsay (1766). He is wearing a dead animal on his head because he is noble. | Public Domain

Rousseau was probably trying to clear his conscience after too many Europeans sailed the open seas, conquering, plundering, and enslaving entire continents. You know…noble behavior.

But as appealing as this Rousseauvian fairy tale sounds, reality paints a different picture. To start, some of the prehistoric cemeteries make modern-day violence look like playground squabbles. One such squabble was over the prime real estate of the Nile Valley on the northern border of Sudan and Egypt. The remains of 61 individuals buried in the cemetery of Jebel Sahaba (site 117) contain skeletons with both healed and unhealed lesions from projectile weapons. In other words, these folks were constantly getting a beat down.

Researchers suspect there were continuous raids in this area due to climate change creating limited resources — a lesson we should heed. Either way, it is clear our ancestors had recurrent episodes of interpersonal violence.

So much for Rousseau’s utopian delusion of the noble savage.

Violence is never noble, but it has been entertaining. In the 1st century A.D. The Roman Empire’s Bread and Circuses provided a cornucopia of thematic bloodshed. In the Colosseum, naked women were tied to stakes and torn apart by lions, tigers, bears, wolves, and crocodiles. Slaves and Christians fought to the death in mock battles. In one popular spectacle, a man playing the role of Prometheus was chained to a rock while a trained eagle pecked out his organs. And, of course, gladiators fought to the death in lavish spectacles. Historians estimate that half a million people died in the Colosseum purely to entertain the civilized masses.

Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1872 | Public Domain

The Roman Empire fascinates because humans were not violent due to limited resources. Humans were violent just for fun. And we sure found creative ways to torture each other.

One of the most inventive, excruciating deaths (and the root of that very word) was crucifixion. In 4 B.C., the Roman general Varus nailed 2000 Jews to a cross. Then we crucified a famous man to absolve us of our sins.

Religion has always been violence’s handmaiden. Some of the worst human atrocities have been committed in the name of religion and then justified by that same religion.

Case in point. We see crosses adorning every church and never associate them with depravity. What if a new religion today used a torture symbol to represent their love, dedication, and passion? Imagine iron maiden symbols on doors or their disciples wearing thumb screws as jewelry. It might scare the kids away from Bible studies.

Although barbarities still occur today, it would be considered insidious to burn people on a stake or rip off their arms in a strappado because they worship a different god. And yet, many religious beliefs have not changed in thousands of years. However, the behavior that espouses those beliefs has changed.

Humans have become civilized.

Fast forward to the modern world. While the first half of the twentieth century was marred by violence, we have become more peaceful in the past 30 years. In one study, mathematicians fine-tuned an algorithm to track the number of global deaths in battle since the Napoleonic wars. The researchers identified two points where war violence dropped — the 1830s and 1990s.

Unfortunately, we don’t know why fewer people died in battle during these periods. Deaths by war are hard to quantify for two reasons. First, the civilians crushed under the boots of invading armies often go unrecorded. Second, it fails to account for the diluvial that follows every war — disease, poverty, and famine.

Ostensibly, wars today are not fought with only battle axes and bullets. But psychopathic leaders refrain from pushing the nuclear button because it will lead to their self-destruction. Sickeningly, atomic weapons keep the peace by driving up the price of war. Or, as Will Durant once mused, “History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.”

Violence simply has too high a price.

One of the first examples of a lethal weapon with too high a price was poison gas, also known as mustard agents. We saw the horrors of mustard gas during WWI. The colorless, garlic-smelling gas burned victims' eyes and skin, blistered the lungs, and caused a slow asphyxiation.

Soldier with moderate mustard agent burns sustained during World War I. He has the characteristic bullae (blisters) on the neck, armpit, and hands. | Public Domain

The commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, called poison gas “barbarous.” The public and the Geneva Protocol of 1925 agreed. After these horrors, the use of poison gas was banned.

During WWII, it was rarely used, not only because it was inhuman, but it also was unpredictable. One wrong wind and soldiers would be choking on their own weapons. Some historians have even postulated that when Saddam Hussein used it to murder thousands of Kurdish citizens in Halabja on March 16, 1988, the public was so repulsed that it turned the tide toward the U.S. disposing of him. Evil always overplays its hand.

However, war is not the only path to violence. In his bestselling book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker contends that our species is living in the least violent time in history.

His book pissed off a lot of people.

But Pinker’s data is solid. He based his argument mainly on data from political scientist Ted Robert Gurr and criminologist Manuel Eisner. In 1981, Gurr painstakingly compiled homicide rates per 100,000 people throughout history using court and country records from England. He found that from the thirteenth through the twentieth century, homicides plummeted by a factor of ten, fifty, and, in some areas, by 100.

Eisner dug deeper and used coroners’ inquests, court cases, and local records from other countries during the same period. He found homicide rates between 4 and 100 per 100,000 people in the Middle Ages. By the 1950s, they were 0.8 per 100,000.

Gurr and Eisner chose to frame violence by murder and not theft or assault for logical reasons. When a man’s shirt is stolen, it might go unnoticed, but when a man’s life is stolen, it is more likely to be recorded. Dead bodies tend to stink up the place.

Pinker’s opponents point out the discordance between population expansion and military size, known as a “scaling effect.” For example, in a tribe of 100 adults, you can easily sustain an army of 25 bloodthirsty warriors. But in a population of 100 million, supporting and coordinating an army of 25 million would become a logistical quagmire.

Unfortunately, these opponents assume that during war, soldiers die more than civilians. And that is not always the case. According to U.N. statistics, a quarter of the world’s population currently lives in conflict-affected areas. That’s a lot of innocent civilians dying in war-torn regions.

Moreover, recent FBI data on violent crimes supports Pinker’s argument. In 2022, the murder rate dropped by 6% and rapes decreased by 5.4%. (Note: the FBI’s violent crime data is always a year behind because it takes a year to collect it.)

And the U.S. is not the only country with lowered murder rates. Since the 1990s, the average homicide rate has reduced by 37% throughout Europe.

Yet, despite decreased violence, society perceives violence as increasing. A recent Pew Research Center poll asked voters if crime has increased since 2008. The majority of voters believed crime was on the rise.

Why are perceptions of violence not in line with reality?

Perhaps the public perceives violence as increasing because of who is falling in the chalk outline — children. In 2020, gun violence became the leading cause of death in children. In 2023, there were 317 school shootings. (There were 18 in 2008.) Move over Scarlett Fever. There’s a new red painting sleepy towns.

Overall, domestic violence —violence against children, parents, spouses, and siblings — doesn’t mirror violence between strangers. Dubbed Verkko’s static law, this criminology theory has found that when homicide rates rise, women are disproportionately less involved, but when homicide rates lower, female victims proportionately increase.

This might seem counterintuitive. But the data is irrefutable. When men are engaging in heightened conflict amongst themselves, incidents involving women and children take a back seat.

To be clear, Verkko’s statistic doesn’t necessarily mean women are safer when the boys are going all fisticuffs. Violence is violence, after all. Instead, it highlights a shift in the dynamics of who’s primarily involved when overall homicide rates shoot up.

Let’s not mince words. When violence rises, men are in its crosshairs — as perpetrators and victims.

Yes, that old chestnut. Men commit 90.3% of homicides — tens times more than women. Men are also 90% more likely than women to be homicide victims. We always forget the second part of that grim statistic.

But it’s not men who are perpetrators and victims of more violent crime. It’s young men. A recent cross-cultural study using data from 63 countries showed that male teenagers were nearly three times more likely to engage in fighting over the previous year than female teenagers. We are seeing this play out now. Half the population of Gaza is under 18.

Still, even the boys are behaving more in the last decade. Since 2006, youth arrests for violent crimes have decreased by a staggering 67%.

One theory for the decrease in violent crimes is that as populations age, we are less prone to violence. In other words, Grandpa isn’t interested in bloodshed. You can argue for nature or nurture on this one. Testosterone drops in men as they age, mellowing them out. But with age comes wisdom and the ability to solve arguments more peacefully (for some).

And the US definitely has an aging population. Demographers have sounded the alarm bell regarding inverted population growth for decades. While fewer babies and more seniors may result in no one to fund social security, it has possibly led to decreased violence.

The picture isn’t as Panglossian elsewhere. In Central and South America, homicides have increased. Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, Iraq, and now Israel remain as violent as ever. But while Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan dominate our news feeds, between 2007 and 2014, more civilians died violently in Mexico than in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2015, Brazil had more violent deaths than Syria.

Researchers suspect the high rates of violence in these areas are due to the Gini coefficient — the degree of income inequality within a specific population or group. Economists have found that in areas of higher income inequality, violence rises. It makes sense. Humans get belligerent when their neighbors have higher status. This has been true since Cane and Abel.

But in a world framed by social media, we can play the compare and despair game more often. Perhaps that is the real reason why it seems violence is increasing. We want to believe it is.

“Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man.”― Will Durant, The Lessons of History

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. Subscribe to Conversations with Carlyn for free content every Wednesday, or become a paid subscriber to get the juicy stuff on Sundays.