Also, remember Trekkin's sample all comes from one small region: mostly the West Bank. We don't know how generalizable that is. e.g. have excavations in Syria found the same thing? They dig skulls up in other places.
So it's not clear whether that's automatically generalizable to cover an arbitrary region we call "middle east" spanning from Egypt, and Turkey to Persia or not, or how that compares with data from other places. After all, I've met some Israelis, and they have some ... weird ideas about history. e.g. in Australia they used to have a doctrine called "terra nullius" e.g. basically denying there were any humans owning the land here before we got here. And guess what - Israelis I've met have basically used the exact same "terra nullius" argument to justify taking over Palestine that us Australians used to use to justify taking the land over from the aboriginals. The parallels in thinking astounded me. e.g. Israeli citizens I've met has some weird propaganda stuff going on in what they're taught, similar to previous colonial racist stuff that my own country has largely put behind us and rejected as nonsense. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for some Israeli research to be published which exagerrated how "brutal and savage" the area was before they got there, it would fit with some of their other biases. even if there was one Palestinian researcher involved in the survey, I'm sure the Israeli government is pulling the strings on what gets funding and what gets published.
e.g. I'd like to see independent skull-data from a range of places before believing that any one point-source by a single research group tells us anything about how one region compares to another. It might well be that murder rates are just much higher in pre-industrial societies. e.g. England's murder rate was 10 times higher before industrialization, and places such as Palestine didn't really industrialize until very recently, if at all.
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