Some clues :

Douglas P. Fry : Pacified Past
Azar Gat : Warfare as an Ancient Feature
Robert L. Carneiro : Complexity and State Formation

Was the 20th century one of the most violent in human history ? (with two world wars and numerous other conflicts) ?

i also like the documentary series : “The Ascent of man” from the BBC in 1973 by Jacob Bronowski.

  • Omniraptor@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    Ok you probably won’t hear this from an AI bot trained to repeat the ideology of the ruling class that this book tries to justify (and for which it gets praised in mainstream media, which I imagine make up most the training data).

    But in reality lots of professional historians have argued this is a very bad book from a historical/scientific perspective. The research is not actually best described as “meticulous”.

    And from a moral perspective, pinker does not see deaths from engineered starvation/malnutrition and displacement (for a more modern equivalent see also the so called “deaths of despair”) as “violent” because they don’t fall into the war/criminality criteria he sets for himself.

    For a compilation of critiques from historans see for example the book “the darker angels of our nature” (link to a review) https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-darker-angels-of-our-nature-refuting-the-pinker-theory-of-history-and-violence-book-review/