Yea its pretty tough, all I can say is stick with it. There is a lot of debate over whether the violence actually represents anything or not.

The book opens with 3 epigraphs:

Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time – Paul Valery

It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrow. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness – Jacob Boehme

Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a reexamination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped – The Yuma Daily Sun, June 13, 1982

Personally I think he is setting the tone here by saying "Humans are violent, we have always been violent". I'll let you come to your own conclusions.