On balance, we may actually come out as more violent than Neanderthals, because nowhere is there evidence they killed youngsters. That’s not the case at the early H. sapiens site of Balzi Rossi, north-west Italy, where a child very probably perished after being stabbed or shot in the back. A stone tool fragment was still lodged in one vertebra, and while it’s possibly some kind of horrific accident, the weight points towards social conflict. Such aggression in our own species, even between hunter-gatherers, is certainly well documented, and clearly accelerated over the past 40,000 years. In
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