Much of that 286 thousand years (or whatever) was spent in band-level hunter-gather societies. These societies have a number of nice features: People tend to be healthy, and in good times they may only work 20 hours per week.

But according to my anthropology professors, these societies tend to have very high death rates. For men, the lifetime risk of being murdered or killed in intergroup fighting runs about 10 to 20%.

So there's a real possibility that the modern era is very safe by historical standards.

>For men, the lifetime risk of being murdered or killed in intergroup fighting runs about 10 to 20%.

That makes being born in western Russia in 1905 look like a peaceful life

Your anthropology professors are ignoring the fact that they're inferring their rates from displaced populations.

Crimes of passion should also be exempted from the general murder rates.

Why should crimes of passion be exempted from the general murder rates? A society where it's more acceptable or common to kill someone who upsets you is a more dangerous society.

Because they're decontextualized. I'd posit that in the context of small organizations most of those murders are a product of deliberate and known risk. Given that, one could liken it to mutual combat at the ethical and social levels. That isn't the whole scope of the matter but the aggregate data would, I suspect, reflect a considerably different picture if it was investigated at such a resolution. Of particular interest would be infidelity and how that fits into the context of a given social order.