[derektank]

>Do you think people just dropped dead?

No, they intentionally killed each other.

If I recall correctly from the last time I read Stephen Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature the murder rate in pre-Industrialized Northern Europe is estimated to be between 50 and 500 per 100K which is anywhere from 10 to 100x as violent as the global rate today. And that's not including inter state or inter tribal warfare.

[tim333]

Indeed. Also an eye opening little bit of history is "The Forgotten Prehistoric War That Killed 95% Of All Men" https://youtu.be/NoFQjAHsWE8

[vik0]

https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf

[vik0]

>I read Stephen Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature

I don't think you realize just how funny of a source that is

I will just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

and this: https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violencenobelsymposium.pd...

And the following is from Pinker himself(https://web.archive.org/web/20201026010157/https://stevenpin...): "The upshot is that each of the following two assertions can be true: (1) the chances of war are lower than they were before, and (2) the damage caused by the most severe imaginable war is greater than it was before. That makes it meaningless—an issue of semantics—to speculate about whether the world is “safer” overall; in one sense it may be safer, in another sense, less safe. That is exactly why Better Angels does not claim, contra Taleb, that the world is “safer” across the board"