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As a history nerd I have to disagree here, I'm just not sure what you're referring to. In terms of the bloodiest conflicts, the 20th century was nasty on a level that no other one ever was before it.
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What do you mean with bloody.
If we take for example the conquest of the holy land by Jews in the old testament (and I think that other groups were as violent as them), where God is said to have commanded them to slay all men and all woman who have sleept with a man.
That genocide, very bloody genocide.
We just have very good reporting about the victims of the twenty century and not so good reporting on the blood that flow in the centuries before.
The evidence we do have points in another direction. Archologist Lawrence H. Keeley for example found that in prehistory tribes a lot more people died through the use of weapons than today.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html makes the case in a bit more detail.
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Maybe the world would have seen more of someother kind of bloodiness that kept continueing because no one had any idea about empathy from any source.
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The point is that there are also a lot of other sources for empaty, as seen in the level of empaty of non christian nations like Japan.