Premise: The gaps in power and technology among modern human societies can be traced to environmental differences rather than cultural or racial ones.

I’m not smarter than a hunter-gatherer from Namibia. My ipod and rechargeable roomba aren’t indicators or badges of any sort of superiority. It’s just that in the last 13,000 years, my ancestors were located in places with access to larger animals that could be domesticated and where food could be cultivated. They also slept with enough animals (perverts) to have developed a library of antibodies to combat life-threatening diseases. And much more recently, my parents immigrated to America.

The overarching point of the book is nothing new to me. I agreed with its premise before I read the book. The details in the book, however, were overwhelming.

I barely made it out of the hunter-gather-to-agriculture section with my sanity intact. Maybe it’s my self-centeredness that I try to apply every interesting truism from 13,000 years ago to my life now. For example, Diamond’s Anna Karenina principle as applied to classifying animals suitable for domestication led me to apply those six characteristics to myself. And upon doing so, I somehow came out of the analysis convinced that I needed to get a tattoo of a 1-yr old bear on my body.

Very dense. Packed with interesting info. Writing is dry. Someone should make a board game out of this book.