Based on what? Steven Pinker - a guy who is trained as a psychologist not as a historian, anthropologist, sociologist or any other relevant discipline. His work was widely criticized by people who are actually in those fields. The Smithsonian says the first war was only 10k years ago - and that wasn't even a real war. It was a small scale massacre. Do you honestly believe you know more about things than the Smithsonian? Or me, who studied this subject area for decades?
Pinker (and others like him) use tiny samples and decide that they indicate universal dynamics. As a scientist, you ought to know well enough how problematic that is.
A single site from Denmark is not representative of the non-state prehistoric horizon in a Northern European context, and it is certainly highly problematic comparing or even grouping it with geographically and temporally removed sites from India, Africa and North America that join Vedbæk in Pinker’s table.
Dwyer, Philip; Mark Micale. The Darker Angels of Our Nature (pp. 111–112). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Aside from the fact that 2 violent deaths in one small Danish settlement after the Paleolithic age cannot be generalized to much, mobile hunter-gatherers have different social organizations and different cultural norms than ones who live in settlements, and for 97% of human history, our ancestors lived in these types of nomadic bands where there was low population density, ample natural resources, lots of kin in neighboring tribes, and group mores designed to enforce harmony and peace.
In addition, rape has become a much more systematic tool of war than it was in prior centuries. K.B. Wilson has noted that in Mozambique rape, mutilation, and even forcing people to cook and eat their own family members was done as a way to terrorize them and prevent them from resisting in an organized manner — something that was carried out with much thought and “rationality” in just the past decade.
Honestly, I don’t have the time or the bandwidth to educate you beyond linking you some stories that speak to different elements.
Lethal group attacks, according to these arguments, emerged only when hunter-gatherer societies grew in size and complexity and later with the birth of agriculture. Archaeology, supplemented by observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures, allows us to identify the times and, to some degree, the social circumstances that led to the origins and intensification of warfare.
Many social arrangements impede war, such as cross-group ties of kinship and marriage; cooperation in hunting, agriculture or food sharing; flexibility in social arrangements that allow individuals to move to other groups; norms that value peace and stigmatize killing; and recognized means for conflict resolution. These mechanisms do not eliminate serious conflict, but they do channel it in ways that either prevent killing or keep it confined among a limited number of individuals.
People are people. They fight and sometimes kill. Humans have always had a capacity to make war, if conditions and culture so dictate.
But those conditions and the warlike cultures they generate became common only over the past 10,000 years — and, in most places, much more recently than that. The high level of killing often reported in history, ethnography or later archaeology is contradicted in the earliest archaeological findings around the globe. (emphasis mine). Scientific American
