Cranial trauma: someone didn’t live through this.
An international team of scientists, studying the ruins of the earliest cities of the Middle East, have made a startling claim.
The world’s first cities, they claim, were very violent places (https://phys.org/news/2023-10-cranial-traumas-cities-built-violence.html). They studied more than 3,500 skeletons and found a high incidence of cranial trauma. Apparently people settled their differences permanently.
Later in history, as cities developed laws and governments, the level of violence ebbed–to rise up again when the Bronze Age civilizations collapsed circa 1200 B.C. Well, there’s a lot of trouble when whole nations go belly-up.
Oddly, when I found the article on Free Republic, all the commenters had the same thought I had–construction accidents. It couldn’t have been easy, building a walled city circa 5,000 B.C. Not much in the way of safety devices. I mean, I thought the point of living in a city was to enjoy greater personal security.
Yeah, uh-huh. Our own cities, here and now, are drowning in crime. Maybe our ancestors were the first to defund the police.
Would any serious reader of Genesis expect our earliest cities to be anything but hotbeds of crime and violence?
And our cities today are nothing to write home about.