One can easily find the random mention of barbaric behavior in todays papers around the world, most of it directed towards the distant past, religious persecutions, witch hunts and the ordinary wars between different clans and countries. It is important to remind ourself that in evolutionary terms, only a few hundred years ago humans were very busy with burning and massacring each other for a very wide verity of reasons.

The obvious and notorious reasons are religion and territory but there are plenty of other crimes that were carried out, in a kind of mundane every day life sort of way, that a person living in modern times does not think about, but happily for us we have archeology to remind us of things that happened, and exploring those events shows us just how brutal the human animal can be.

St. Brice’s Day Massacre was an organized killing of Vikings (Danish people mostly) in England at around the year 1,001, the king had thought he had found a plot to kill him and so he ordered his loyal subjects to murder and “exterminate” any viking they could find, and they did so with great pleasure.

This did happen a thousand years ago (as the story in the link goes) and it clearly shows that any type of “other” group in any country was vulnerable to these kinds of attacks and under the constant threat of extermination for one reason or the other, it was not only the Catholics, or the Protestants or the Jews or Muslims, black yellow or white toned skins people who suffered but alsmot anyone who was not in the standard of his location.

Lets hope that we have progressed as we should have in the last millennia to distance ourself from such actions and thoughts.