" What about ancient skeletons, then? Steven Pinker cites twenty-one excavations having an average murder rate of 15 per cent. 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. So how much archaeological evidence is there for early warfare, before the days of farming, riding horses and living in settled societies? How much proof is there that war is in our nature? The answer is almost none. To date, some three thousand Homo sapiens skeletons unearthed at four hundred sites are old enough to tell us something about our ‘natural state’.46 Scientists who have studied these sites see no convincing evidence for prehistoric warfare.47 In later periods, it’s a different story. ‘War does not go forever backwards in time,’ says renowned anthropologist Brian Ferguson. ‘It had a beginning.’48 48 "

― Rutger Bregman , Humankind: A Hopeful History