[yawboakye]

the weakness of his argument is that he didn't restrict himself to a certain people's history. the hammurabi code you cite wasn't the universal law, and only applied to subjects of hammurabi. savages live in groups and share all sorts of responsibilities (see edward burnett tylor's primitive cultures vol. 1 & 2). which gives some weight to his original assertion.

generally, human civilization is us picking and choosing sensible/humane parts of cultures we encounter. the romans who conquered greece were of barbarian culture, only civilized by their adoption of the greek culture, which they later spread to parts of the world the conquered. the greeks remained uncivilized for a long time as well. they attribute most of their development to encounters with egyptians and babylonians. thus, it's almost possible to see a primitive culture that upheld some of the core values of our civilization today: human rights (not too far back but pericle's athens abolished slave trade), etc.

[Retric]

Hammurabi was just an example, describing global attitudes vs children globally across all of written history is a monumental tasks so let’s just focus on infanticide as a proxy for how much society actually protects kids. Genocide and slavery show a disregard for some children rather than all children. But be be warned it’s not pretty and western civilization pre christianity defiantly practiced it.

If you go to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide

“Most Stone Age human societies routinely practiced infanticide, and estimates of children killed by infanticide in the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras vary from 15 to 50 percent.”

“Infanticide became forbidden in Europe and the Near East during the 1st millennium.” Except if you dig into the details those bans where very local, it continues:

“Christianity forbade infanticide from its earliest times, which led Constantine the Great and Valentinian I to ban infanticide across the Roman Empire in the 4th century. Yet, infanticide was not unacceptable in some wars and infanticide in Europe reached its peak during World War II (1939-45), during the Holocaust and the T4 Program.[2] The practice ceased in Arabia in the 7th century after the founding of Islam, since the Quran prohibits infanticide. Infanticide of male babies had become uncommon in China by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), whereas infanticide of female babies became more common during the One-Child Policy era (1979–2015). During the period of Company rule in India, the East India Company attempted to eliminate infanticide but were only partially successful, and female infanticide in some parts of India still continues. Infanticide is now very rare in industrialised countries but may persist elsewhere.”

Thus as far as we can tell it was common globally from the Stone Age, through Bronze Age up until quite recently. Also of note, those bans wouldn’t necessarily be reflected as a change in all cultures in that area only the options of those running the country.