Skip this book. Pinker is not an historian or an anthropologist and AFAIK his views are not accepted by most in the field. He does produce some "data"--cherry-p

Skip this book. Pinker is not an historian or an anthropologist and AFAIK his views are not accepted by most in the field. He does produce some "data"--cherry-picked to support his straw-man hypotheses--but spends a lot more time filling in the gaps of his theory with anecdotes and his own idle speculation. Here is a taste from Ch 2 (p. 88): Recall, for example, Eckhardt’s claim that hunter-gatherers had "little to fight about." But organisms that have evolved by natural selection always have something to fight about. Hobbes noted that humans in particular have three reasons for quarrel: Yes, his response to another book on the same subject written by an actual historian is "natural selection" and Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes might be the most cited luminary in the entire chapter dealing with the paleolithic. Despite being a psychologist, Pinker seems to constantly fall prey to the availability heuristic, drawing considerable evidence from the last 100 years, and most evidence from the medieval to modern periods. Only cursory attention is given to humans pre-9000 BCE, despite this comprising over 95% of the modern human timeline. One piece of evidence he does bring up is the ~9000 BCE Kennewick Man, where he notes a possible spear wound. Unmentioned is that this man had very modern proportions, owing to a nutritious diet that would have rivaled that of most humans until 100 years ago. By limiting his scope to the period following the agricultural revolution, he misses that metrics of nutrition, disease, mortality, working hours, and inequality all declined with the rise of centralized states and have only recently recovered to paleolithic levels (not working hours) (for height proxy, see [0], for Y chromosome proxy of equality, see [1]). Pinker's proposed "civilizing" effect of states in reducing human violence is mostly taken from examples of inter-state violence without much consideration for intra-state violence and the power of states to control and extract work from their populations under the threat of violence. Indeed, his "better angels" message is ultimately authoritarian: our ancestors were savage but we are moral because powerful states give us no other choice. If you believe that you may be able to overlook his many logical leaps. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#/media/File:Human_heights_over_the_long-run,_OWID.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#/media/File:Human... [1] https://genome.cshlp.org/content/25/4/459 https://genome.cshlp.org/content/25/4/459