Yes, I get that about the pattern matching. It makes a lot of sense that we take shortcuts when we can as part of human nature/brain function. What truly surprised me was the anger and vitriol that I got in response to saying that for 97% of human history humans had lived fairly peaceably and equitably. It wasn’t just, “No that’s wrong,” it was vehemently so. But again, maybe that is this type of bias plus internet anonymity.

I also got a lot of “evidence to the contrary” that really wasn’t. It was all from less than 12,000 years ago, which may have been a form of cognitive dissonance or it may have been just been that what we think of as the history of the ancients is still quite recent in human history.