Read the History story I linked. It's from 2023 and I've seen similar stories everywhere lately saying the same thing. The overarching consensus is now that the first evidence of war is from 10k years ago. Jebel Sahaba seems to be a series of skirmishes over time and not an actual war. And if the first war was only about 3% of human history ago, how on earth can we have less violence now than the 97% of history that came before that? And that's only the first problem of many.

I urge you to read the book I mentioned because it's not just Micale - it's dozens and dozens of people with actual expertise in the relevant subject matters making very precise and concrete holes in Pinker's assertions. Failing to characterize anything but fatalities from war, homicide, and other torture as violence in a society is only one problem, but there are many, many others, including a rather shocking abuse of quantitative and statistical evidence.

In a chapter written by Linda Fibiger (senior lecturer, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh | UoE | School of History, Classics and Archaeology):

This shines a rather poor light on Pinker’s literacy and understanding of the period of human history that forms the cornerstone of his argument for a decline in violence. Take, for example, the table illustrating the percentage of deaths in warfare in non-state and state societies that Pinker provides (on p. 49) in order to demonstrate just how violent prehistoric and hunter-gatherer societies were compared to state societies. Twenty-two sites in the table list warfare deaths at prehistoric sites. Overall, they make up a rather incoherent sample.14 One of those sites is Vedbæk, a small Danish cemetery in which only two of a total of twenty-one individuals presented skeletal changes indicative of violence. This translates into a percentage figure of violent deaths of 9.5 per cent (although for some reason it shows as around 12 or 13 per cent on Pinker’s table). People were buried at this site in the fifth millennium BC, which for the region means they belong to the Mesolithic (i.e. hunter-gatherer dominated) Ertebølle horizon (named after its type site in Jutland), representing complex hunter-gatherer-fisher groups with settlement sites (some of which were probably occupied year-round).

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. (emphasis mine)

Dwyer, Philip; Mark Micale. The Darker Angels of Our Nature (pp. 111-112). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Coincidentally I've been working on a story about all of this. It's gotten tabled due to Life, but perhaps now I'll work on it some more, and you can see if that changes your impression at all.