The Long Way Back to Ourselves

4.2

War: The Organization of Violence

This episode traces the archaeological evidence for organized violence, starting with a 13,000-year-old cemetery on the Nile where healed and fresh stone-point injuries suggest a population expecting repeated raids, and a Neolithic mass grave at Talheim, Germany, where victims were killed with the tools used to build their houses. It works through the dispute between Steven Pinker's claim that violence has declined and critics such as Lawrence Keeley, citing a 2013 study showing most killings among foragers were interpersonal, not organized war. You hear historian Charles Tilly's formulation that war made the state and the state made war, traced through taxation funding standing armies. It argues war is the product of surplus, hierarchy, and a shared story, which built civilization.