Reddit reviews The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman

Yes, but the word "contact" in this context has a different meaning than you are thinking. It's confusing, but when referencing indigenous peoples "uncontacted" really means "without an established relationship with modern society." It also is applied only on an individual level, which causes strange statements, such as saying that half the members of a tribe are "uncontacted" while the other half are "contacted." Many of the people listed in the wikipedia article have been studied thoroughly. Calling the Yanomami "uncontacted" is ludicrous by any conventional sense of the word. Not only have multiple anthropologists lived with them and then published books about them; Yanomami themselves have published books.

There are pretty much no people in the world today that actually are what you think of when you hear "uncontacted."

>I think it goes back a lot further than that. I don't know where he gets his data, but Steven Pinker argues that this is possibly the most peaceful time ever. Article

I had a feeling that Pinker was going to rear his head sooner or later.

The thing about it is that Pinker is a cognitive scientist, not a historian and certainly not an anthropologist.

The data he used to support this claim is as worst fabricated (Ancient Greece, Rome) and at best cherry picked (the data relating to violent deaths later).

He relies heavily upon the controversial work of the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, and he is only second to the uncritical accepting of Chagnon's findings about the Yanomami to Chagnon himself. Chagnon's work is still hotly disputed. Even a Yanomami shaman has written a book partly in response to Chagnon's work.

The thing about it is that total war is a modern phenomenon, and prior to that the closest we came to it was the imperial wars - Chinese, Mongolian, Ottoman, Persian etc. - colonization, and the Crusades/reconquista etc., but even so that only goes so far back as agriculture and human settlement.