Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. The visitor might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four-h...
New Guinea’s laughing sickness, transmitted by cannibalism and caused by a slow-acting virus from which no one has ever recovered. Kuru was on its way to exterminating New Guinea’s Foré tribe of 20,00...
New Guinea has by far the highest concentration of languages in the world: 1,000 out of the world’s 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas, and divided into doze...
Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology.
Animal populations that for one reason or another escaped control by predators and parasites have in some cases also escaped their own internal controls on their numbers, multiplied until they damaged...
The Viking expansion is a good example of what is termed an auto-catalytic process. In chemistry the term catalysis means the speeding-up of a chemical reaction by an added ingredient, such as an enzy...
在我年轻时，同辈人都准备过上20年苦日子，如果幸运的话，晚年也许会宽裕些。现在的年轻人一早就想过好日子，谈到工作，第一个问题就是‘薪水多少？工作时间多长？有没有假期？’每一个我认识的蒙大拿农民不是担忧自己...
Large societies cannot function with band organization and instead are complex kleptocracies.
History is not just one damn fact after another, as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.
Food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel. Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herd...
And went on to colonize the next island again. It was a hitherto unprecedented
Yet we promise developing countries that, if they will only adopt good policies, like honest government and free market economies, they too can become like the First World today. That promise is utter...
With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.
Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues.
The near-simultaneous disappearance of so many large species raises an obvious question: what caused it? An obvious possible answer is that they were killed off or else eliminated indirectly by the fi...
New Guineans old and young routinely eat mice, spiders, frogs, and other small animals that peoples elsewhere with access to large domestic mammals or large wild game species do not bother to eat. Pro...
In an epidemic those people with genes for resistance to that particular microbe are more likely to survive than are people lacking such genes. As a result, over the course of history, human populatio...
Britain never regained its naval and economic dominance over the world, and it remains notoriously conflicted (Brexit) about its role in Europe. But Britain is still among the world’s six richest nati...
The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV...
These we killed, and others we killed—but what of that? It was in accordance with our custom.