I think about this every time I'm at a zoo or monkey temple watching primates interact - fighting, sure, but not torturing or persecuting or enslaving or committing genocide - and wonder at what point in evolution did we start being so brutal and cruel to one another as to cause the kind of trauma that now seems so common.

I don't claim to be any kind of expert on history, so I don't know how far back we've had the scale and brutality of the wars of the last 100-or-so years. But I have an easy time believing that the more recent wars have done more to traumatise people who were in them, as well as those who weren't due to the widespread media coverage that's also happened relatively recently.

At the same time, I agree with your point; trauma is not new and we certainly see it in other animals (maltreated dogs for example).

And I certainly believe the phenomenon I'm talking about could go back well beyond the past 100-ish years; that would make sense in my case, as none of my parents or grandparents were directly involved in the wars.

But I just wonder if the scale and brutality of the more recent wars, along with the media exposure, have made the problem more intense and widespread.