For those who deny original sin

Earliest Evidence For Large Scale Organized Warfare In The Mesopotamian World
(Read the whole thing here.)

A huge battle destroyed one of the world's earliest cities at around 3500 B.C. and left behind, preserved in their places, artifacts from daily life in an urban settlement in upper Mesopotamia, according to a joint announcement from the University of Chicago and the Department of Antiquities in Syria.

[…] The discovery provides the earliest evidence for large scale organized warfare in the Mesopotamian world, the team said.

The team found extensive destruction with collapsed walls, which had undergone heavy bombardment by sling bullets and eventually collapsed in an ensuing fire. Work during an earlier season showed the settlement was protected by a 10-foot high mud-brick wall.

The excavators retrieved more than 1,200 smaller, oval-shaped bullets (about an inch long and an inch and a half in diameter) and some 120 larger round clay balls (two and half to four inches in diameter). "This clearly was no minor skirmish. This was 'Shock and Awe' in the Fourth Millennium B.C.," Reichel said.

Please, God, let me never hear another argument about the noble primitive man being corrupted by civilization. Hamoukar is the oldest known city, dating to about 4000 B.C., the last part of the Neolithic (New Stone Age), and apparently predates the development of written language. And here they are slaughtering each other.

We killed each other then; we killed each other before then; we kill each other now. We killed the prophets; we killed the martyrs; we killed the Son of God. If He came back the same way today, I have no doubt that we’d kill Him again. It’s who we are, and it’s what we do. The only escape from the cycle comes from looking to Him, not from looking to some noble human past.

P.S. Good for the authors for using B.C. and not B.C.E. (Before the Common Era)! Jesus is the only reason the era is “common” in the first place!