“Violence Before Agriculture” by John G. Halstead, Philip Thomson

This is a summary of a report on trends in violence since the dawn of humanity: from the hunter-gatherer period to the present day.[1] The full report is available at this Substack and as a preprint on SSRN.[2] Phil did 95% of the work on the report. Expert reviewers provided the following comments on our report.“Thomson and Halstead have provided an admirably thorough and fair assessment of this difficult and emotionally fraught empirical question. I don’t agree with all of their conclusions, but this will surely be the standard reference for this issue for years to come.”Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University“This work uses an impressively comprehensive survey of ethnographic and archeological data on military mortality in historically and archeologically known small-scale societies in an effort to pin down the scale of the killing in the pre-agricultural world. This will be a useful [...] The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 2nd, 2023 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QH2sECmmbLWbMXLhJ/violence-before-agriculture --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.