Two paragraphs above the part I quoted: What about ancient skeletons, then? Steven Pinker cites twenty-one excavations having an average murder rate of 15 perc

Two paragraphs above the part I quoted: What about ancient skeletons, then? Steven Pinker cites twenty-one excavations having an average murder rate of 15 percent. But, as before, Pinker's list here is a bit of a mess. Twenty of the twenty-one digs date from a time after the invention of farming, the domestication of horses, or the rise of settlements, making them altogether too recent. Further info: The anthropologist Douglas Fry was skeptical, however. Reviewing the original sources [of Pinker's list], he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorized as [most violent tribe] Ache 'war mortality' actually concerned a tribe member listed as 'shot by Paraguayan.'