As I've asked Has Life Gotten Better?, I've run into some intense debates about how violent early humans were.

• The Better Angels of Our Nature argues that our distant past looks incredibly violent compared to today (and the relevant page from Our World in Data gives a similar impression).
• But I've also seen pointed criticisms of this conclusion from sources such as Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution and War, Peace and Human Nature. These works tend to imply that early humans were relatively non-violent (or at least didn't war much).

Trying to unravel and understand the points of disagreement has been confusing, but necessary to get a decent picture of trends in quality of life over very long time periods. The rate of violent deaths is one of the few systematic, meaningful-seeming metrics for assessing quality of life before a couple hundred years ago, and strong claims are made on both sides.

As of now, I believe a different story than either "violent death rates have consistently gone down over time" or "early societies were remarkably peaceful." Here's my current impression:

Hypothesis	Advanced by	Time period	My take
(A) There was a rise in violent death rates sometime around (or before) 10,000 BCE, as people moved from a nomadic lifestyle (moving from place to place) to a sedentary one (staying in one place indefinitely).	Some anthropologists, including critics of Better Angels of our Nature	Varies by region, but first transition would be sometime around (or perhaps before) 10,000 BCE	I'd guess this is true, with low confidence.
(B) There was a fall in violent death rates during the initial transition from non-state to state societies.	Better Angels of our Nature	Varies by region, but first development of major states was around 5,000 BCE.	I am unconvinced / don't find this particularly likely.
(C) Today's society (especially the developed world) has lower violent death rates than prehistoric societies, both nomadic and sedentary.	Better Angels of our Nature	10,000 BCE and earlier vs. today	I'd guess this is true, with moderate confidence.
(C) There was a fall in violent death rates in Europe starting around 1300, and the US around 1600.	Better Angels of our Nature	1300 CE and later	Seems true based on homicide data, though large-scale atrocities could complicate the picture (future post).
(D) It's unclear what happened to violent death rates in between the initial transition to sedentary societies and 1300 CE.	(Additional observation I'm making)	Period between 10,000 BCE and 1300-1600 CE	Seems true

Simplified visual timeline version:

Below, I will:

• Lay out the best data I know of (from Our World in Data) for violent death rates in pre-state societies. I'll briefly discuss the interpretation ("B" above) that early societies were very violent, and became less so as powerful states arose.
• Examine the main criticism I’ve seen of this data. The criticism is that one needs to distinguish between “sedentary” pre-state societies (which stay indefinitely in one area, and tend to be relatively hierarchical) and “nomadic” societies (which move from place to place, tend to be more egalitarian, and are hypothesized to be more representative of the distant past).
• Try to pull apart and compare (1) “sedentary” societies; (2) “nomadic” societies; (3) today’s world. I think that "sedentary" societies look more violent than "nomadic" ones, implying that violence rose at some point in the past (lending support to (A) in the chart above), while both look more violent than today's world (lending support to part of (C) in the chart above).
• Discuss the state of the evidence on what happened to violent death rates in between prehistory and today (which will cover (D) and part of (C) in the chart above).

Data on violent death rates from pre-state societies

Chapter 2 of Better Angels of Our Nature makes comparisons between violent death statistics in non-state societies vs. state societies. Since (it seems) there were no "states" from the beginning of our species until the emergence of the first states around ~5,000 BCE,¹ the presumption is that these statistics are a decent way to get at the prevalence of violence in the distant pre-state past, compared to the prevalence of violence in later periods with states.

For a summary, I'll lay out these graphics from Our World in Data, which are essentially the same as those from Better Angels, with some updates and corrections.

One immediate observation: I don't think this data provides much evidence about the argument that the early transitions from non-state to state societies led to a decline in violence ("B" in the chart above).² This is because:

• The state societies presented are all from 1600 CE and later, other than "Central Mexico, 1419-1519 CE" (whose violent death rate fits right in with the non-state rates).
• 1600 CE is a very long time after the appearance of the first states. So this is a comparison between non-state societies and recent or modern state societies - not between non-state societies and the state societies that closely followed them.³

What this data may (and, as I'll argue below, does) show is that today's societies appear to have low violent death rates compared to the distant past.

Nomadic vs. sedentary societies

I've looked for criticisms of the arguments about early violence given in Better Angels. One of the major ones is that the earliest societies weren't just non-state societies - they were specifically nomadic foraging societies, which were more egalitarian than other types of non-state societies. And the high violent death rates above mostly don't come from nomadic foraging societies.

For an example of this criticism, see quote in footnote from Hunter-Gatherer and Human Evolution by Richard B. Lee.⁴ (For some other criticisms and my responses, see Appendix 1.)

In a sense, this critique isn't directly contradicting Better Angels, which has explicitly chosen to take a "state vs. non-state societies" lens rather than an "earlier humans vs. later humans" lens.⁵ But if nomadic foragers were less violent than other societies and most early societies were nomadic foragers, this would mean that there was at least one historical case of violent death rates going up (even if they later went back down).

From what I can tell, the distinction between nomadic foraging societies and sedentary societies is widely recognized as real and important, though much about it is disputable and disputed. I have seen a lot of casual references to this distinction; the most thorough discussion I've found is in Chapter 9 of The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers (abbreviated for the rest of this piece as "Lifeways"; more here on why I consider this source especially helpful/credible). Here's a quote giving the basic idea:

If I asked the average anthropology student to imagine a group of hunter-gatherers, it is most likely that the Ju/’hoansi would come to mind: small, peaceful, nomadic bands composed of men and women with few possessions and who are equal in wealth, opportunity, and status. Yet ... the average student is also aware of cases that easily overturn that image: large, sedentary, warring, possession-laden Northwest Coast societies, where men boasted of their exploits, status, and power ...

[the latter] are nonegalitarian societies, whose elites possess slaves, fight wars, and overtly seek prestige. Although anthropologists have long considered [these societies] to be exceptions, products of resource-rich environments, archaeologists continue to discover evidence of nonegalitarian foraging societies in many environments ...

It's important to note that when Lifeways uses the term "egalitarian," it's only in a relative sense - for example, it specifically states that even "egalitarian" societies have inegalitarian gender relations.⁶ "Egalitarian" in this context seems to refer to (a) general norms against explicit hierarchy and boasting of status;⁷ (b) perhaps a lack of permanent power hierarchy.⁸

The remainder of that chapter implies that nonegalitarian societies are more likely to be sedentary (occupying a single area indefinitely) as opposed to nomadic (needing to periodically move in order to get to an area with more resources). One rough intuition I've seen is that it's hard to accumulate wealth in a society that periodically relocates entirely (and that lacks currency, banking, etc.) At the same time, this chapter emphasizes that this association (and the idea of "egalitarian" societies) can be oversimplified (quotes in footnote).⁹

The reason this might matter is the claim that - to quote Lee again - "nomadic foragers ... reflect most closely the characteristics of ancient foragers." The idea being that for most of human history (hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years), most humans were mobile and "egalitarian," and it was relatively recent (perhaps somewhat, but not long, before the Neolithic Revolution of ~10,000 BCE) that sedentary societies started popping up.

This is a view that many seem to hold, including Lee as quoted above, as well as Robert Kelly (the author of Lifeways)¹⁰ - though I have also seen it disputed by those who believe that early humans could have been largely nonegalitarian. (Better Angels is one of the sources that argues the latter - quotes in footnote).¹¹

To recap this section:

• There is a common association between societies' being nomadic and egalitarian, though I haven't seen a systematic examination of the association, and believe that this idea is at least somewhat oversimplified.
• There is a common view that nomadic, egalitarian societies are most representative of the distant past, though this too is disputed.

With this in mind, I think it makes sense to try to distinguish between nomadic/egalitarian and sedentary/nonegalitarian societies in the data provided above. I'll do that next.

Violent death rates in nomadic societies, sedentary societies, and today's societies

Unfortunately, it is not at all straightforward to determine whether a given society is "nomadic/egalitarian" or "sedentary/inegalitarian."

• These distinctions are only sometimes flagged in the papers that discuss violence stats.
• They don't appear to be clear-cut or undisputed.
• I've often been unable to get confident about what category a given society belongs in via searching, sometimes because societies gradually transition from nomadic to sedentary over time (so the timing of when the violence stats were assessed becomes crucial).
• Both Better Angels and Our World in Data rely primarily on three "aggregator" sources that pull many estimates of violent death rates from previous papers. But when I examined these, I felt that none gave reliable classifications.
  • Keeley 1996 provides the largest number of estimates. Unfortunately, it says little about its methods for deciding what to include, and doesn't distinguish between nomadic and sedentary societies. Additionally, commentary from a later paper (Bowles 2009, noted below) made me concerned about its reliability.¹²
  • Bowles 2009 distinguishes explicitly between sedentary and nomadic societies in one of its tables.¹³ However, this table seems to contain 4 meaningful errors in its 8 rows (see appendix). (BTW, I think this topic is cursed. Lifeways contains a table that should be a collection of homicide rates among foraging societies, but is an erroneous reprint of the previous table; and one of Our World in Data's key tables is also an erroneous reprint of the previous table, which they haven't fixed even though I emailed them about it, though in that case I was able to find the right table by guessing the URL. At least this blog post is perfect.)
  • Gat 2006 mostly doesn't distinguish between sedentary and nomadic.¹⁴

To try to get at the distinction, I tried to identify "nomadic forager" societies using Lifeways, Youngberg and Hanson 2010, and the Bowles 2009 classifications, in the set of societies that Our World in Data lists violent death rates for.¹⁵

I was only able to identify three:

Society	Violent deaths per 100,000 people per year	Why I think they count as nomadic foragers
Murngin	330	Bowles 2009 classifies them this way
Tiwi	160	Youngberg and Hanson 2010 names them as one of five societies that best meet the criteria for "societies that most resemble the social environment where most human psychology seems to have evolved: small bands of nomadic foragers." Lifeways also labels the Tiwi "egalitarian" in Table 7-9.
!Kung (aka Ju/'hoansi)	42	Very commonly cited as an example of a nomadic, egalitarian society, e.g. they are the example given when Lifeways explains the distinction

Next, I'll discuss what this tells us about (a) violent death rates in nomadic vs. sedentary societies; (b) violent death rates in early societies vs. today's.

Violent death rates in nomadic vs. sedentary societies

The violent death rates above seem significantly lower than what you'd get if you weren't separating out nomadic foragers.

• In context of the full Our World in Data set, these societies rank as the 17th, 25th and 28th most violent out of 30.
• The median violent death rate (per 100k people per year) for that set is 420, compared to 160 for the median of this set.
• I believe that most of the other, generally more violent societies are probably sedentary, based on their locations¹⁶) and a few confirmed cases.
• A couple other data points show a similar pattern of sedentary populations having notably (but not astronomically - something like 2x) higher violent death rates.¹⁷

This implies - if we accept the (non-consensus, but widely held) point that the earliest humans were mostly nomadic - that violent death rates likely rose as people transitioned from nomadic to sedentary societies.

Violent death rates in nomadic societies vs. today's world

It's not totally straightforward to compare the above figures to figures from today's societies, because we need clarity on what exactly "deaths from violence" are - do they include homicides? Battle deaths? Suicides? Poisonings? Deaths from violent accidents and encounters with animals?

• My current impression is that the violent death figures cited above are inclusive of battle deaths and homicides (which I'd guess can be a fuzzy line for small bands of people),¹⁸ while it's ambiguous whether they include other sorts of violent deaths.¹⁹
• I haven't found a ready-made analogous statistic for today's societies (something combining homicides, battle deaths, and potentially more), so I tabulated the figures myself here (based on this Our World in Data source, as well as this population data), creating both a "high" and "low" violent death rate estimate.
  • The "low" estimate is just deaths from terrorism, interpersonal violence, and "conflict and terrorism".
  • The high estimate adds in executions, poisonings, self-harm deaths, and road injuries (a big one).

Here's my summary:

Society	Violent deaths per 100,000 people per year
Murngin	330
Tiwi	160
!Kung (aka Ju/'hoansi)	42
World (today) - high estimate	35.4
USA (today) - high estimate	35.2
World (today) - low estimate	7.4
Western Europe (today) - high estimate	6.6
USA (today) - low estimate	6.2
Western Europe (today) - low estimate	0.3

The upshot - today's world looks nowhere near as violent as the few foraging societies we have figures for.

A couple of additional notes on these comparisons in a footnote.²⁰

Note that there are significant caveats to the data on foraging societies, and I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out upon further investigation that - when accounting for large-scale wars and atrocities - today's world looks at least as violent as nomadic foraging societies. (I wouldn't be shocked, but it's not what I currently expect.)

Comparison to societies in between then and now

As discussed above, it looks like the societies most likely to be representative of our most distant past have high violent death rates compared to today. It also looks like violent death rates went up at some point in the distant past (around or prior to 10,000 BCE).²¹

What about in between ~10,000 BCE and today?

There isn't a huge amount we can say about this period. Interestingly, all of the data we have on violent death rates seems to be either (interpreted as) being about the very distant past (many thousands of years ago) or about the relatively recent past (1300 CE and later).

My rough understanding of why this is:

• To make guesses about the distant past, we can look at currently-existing societies that seem to have "never modernized" in the sense of adopting agriculture or becoming part of large-scale states.²²
• Starting in 1300 CE, we start to have (in a small number of European countries) systematic written records of things like court cases that make it possible to estimate homicide rates.
• But for the in-between period, we have neither.²³

Still, we can look at the data we do have on 1300 CE and later, and draw some clues from that. My current overall guess:

• Violent death rates fell at some point in between ~10,000 BCE and the kind of modernization that came with court records and made homicide rate estimates possible (around 1300 CE in Europe, later elsewhere).
• After that sort of modernization, they fell fairly steadily.

I'll explain these points next.

The earliest systematic data I've seen from actual past homicide reports (as opposed to inference from ethnography or archaeology) is from this chart (there is a similar one in Better Angels):

The starting homicide rate is 25-55 per 100k people per year, which looks low compared to the figures above (especially the figures that don't distinguish between nomadic and sedentary societies!) This implies that there was some decline in violence even before 1300 (in addition to the big decline afterward, shown).

However:

The chart is only of homicides, and other sources of violent deaths could complicate the picture. For example, eyeballing this chart suggests that we might want to add something like 50 to the figure for the UK just to account for battle deaths; and we don't know how much more we'd have to add if we wanted to include suicides, executions and violent accidents.

Western Europe may not be representative. Some of the only other homicide data I've seen from around this period is in the following charts from Better Angels:

The starting rates here don't look clearly lower than the figures for nomadic forager societies.²⁴

My current overall guess: after violent death rates ~doubled with the transition from nomadic to sedentary societies (discussed above), they then fell back to the original rates (but not necessarily much below) at some point in between then and the kind of modernization that came with court records and made homicide rate estimates possible. After that sort of modernization, they fell fairly steadily, as shown in the above charts.

I've now covered each of (A)-(D) discussed in the intro. Here's the graphical summary again:

Whew! I hope you found that at least somewhat less confusing to read than I did to write. Having gotten something resembling clarity on violent death rates over the long run, I can use this for the broader question of whether life has gotten better.

The story for "overall quality of life" looks broadly similar to the story for violent death rates: things look like they got worse around 10,000 BCE (when agriculture was developed), then we have a big mystery between then and the early 2nd millennium, and since then there was some improvement (which accelerated in the Industrial Revolution a couple hundred years ago). This is a different picture from either "Life has gotten steadily better throughout our history" or "Life was best in the state of nature," both of which I think are more common memes.

 Comment/discuss

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Footnotes