Nataruk

Archaeological site west of Lake Turkana, Turkana County, Kenya.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness	Carlo Rovelli	subject	A 10,000-year-old massacre that Rovelli uses to ask whether war is as old as we are.

There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness — Carlo Rovelli (2020)

Source: There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness · Readwise highlight

Ten thousand years ago, at Nataruk, on the ancient shore of a lake that was much bigger at the time, there was a massacre.

• Role: subject
• In the book: “Dramatic Echoes of Ancient Wars” sets out two theories of war: that it began with agriculture and stored wealth, or that violence between groups is intrinsic to our species. Then “the discoveries at Lake Turkana add something to the debate”: twenty-seven skeletons of men, women and children, unburied, with crushed skulls and stone arrowheads in ribcages. Rovelli calls it “the oldest evidence of conflict between humans that we have found to date”.
• Why it matters: The site is the essay’s evidence. It’s the concrete case that unsettles the comfortable idea that war is recent, and the essay is built around what it implies.