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...
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...
Negative images of emigration were transformed into positive ones, not by Wakefield in 1830, but by a much broader trans-Atlantic ideological transition around 1815. Its semiotic shape was the partial...
It’s neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is t...
In contrast [to trees and fish], oil, metals, and coal are not renewable; they don't reproduce, sprout, or have sex to produce baby oil droplets or coal nuggets.
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...
For any ranked society, whether a chiefdom or a state, one thus has to ask, why do the commoners tolerate the transfer of the fruits of their hard labor to kleptocrats? This question raised by politic...
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...
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...
Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?
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 underlying reason why this transition was piecemeal is that food production systems evolved as a result of the accumulation of many separate decisions about allocating time and effort. Foraging hu...
Similarly, in an autocatalytic expanison of a human population, some initial advantages that a people gains (such as technological advantages) bring them profits or discoveries, which in turn stimulat...
SO MUCH FOR our dispassionate examination of the germ’s interests. Now let’s get back to considering our own selfish interests: to stay alive and healthy, best done by killing the damned germs. One co...
Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology.
Despite being depicted in innumerable cartoons as apelike brutes living in caves, Neanderthals had brains slightly larger than our own. They were also the first humans to leave behind strong evidence...
A striking example from the history of writing is the origin of the syllabary devised in Arkansas around 1820 by a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah, for writing the Cherokee language. Sequoyah observed...
These we killed, and others we killed—but what of that? It was in accordance with our custom.
My own health legacy of New Guinea has been a year of malaria and a year of dysentery.
And went on to colonize the next island again. It was a hitherto unprecedented