The World Until Yesterday Quotes

“The U.S. has so many rules and regulations, because of fear of being sued, that kids give up on the opportunity for personal exploration. A pool has to be fenced so that it’s not an ‘attractive nuisance.’ Most New Guineans don’t have pools, but even the rivers that we frequented didn’t have signs saying ‘Jump at your own risk,’ because it’s obvious. Why would I jump unless I’m prepared for the consequences? Responsibility in the U.S. has been taken from the person acting and has been placed on the owner of the land or the builder of the house. Most Americans want to blame someone other than themselves as much as possible. In New Guinea I was able to grow up, play creatively, and explore the outdoors and nature freely, with the obligatory element of risk, however well managed, that is absent from the average risk-averse American childhood. I had the richest upbringing possible, an upbringing inconceivable for Americans.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“The shift from hunting-gathering to farming began only about 11,000 years ago; the first metal tools were produced only about 7,000 years ago; and the first state government and the first writing arose only around 5,400 years ago. “Modern” conditions have prevailed, even just locally, for only a tiny fraction of human history; all human societies have been traditional for far longer than any society has been modern.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“The biggest adjustment I had to make on moving from New Guinea to the U.S. was my lack of freedom. Children have much more freedom in New Guinea. In the U.S. I was not allowed to climb trees. I was always climbing trees in New Guinea; I still like to climb trees. When my brother and I came back to California and moved into our house there, one of the first things we did was to climb a tree and build a tree house; other families thought that was weird. The U.S. has so many rules and regulations, because of fear of being sued, that kids give up on the opportunity for personal exploration. A pool has to be fenced so that it’s not an ‘attractive nuisance.’ Most New Guineans don’t have pools, but even the rivers that we frequented didn’t have signs saying ‘Jump at your own risk,’ because it’s obvious. Why would I jump unless I’m prepared for the consequences? Responsibility in the U.S. has been taken from the person acting and has been placed on the owner of the land or the builder of the house. Most Americans want to blame someone other than themselves as much as possible. In New Guinea I was able to grow up, play creatively, and explore the outdoors and nature freely, with the obligatory element of risk, however well managed, that is absent from the average risk-averse American childhood. I had the richest upbringing possible, an upbringing inconceivable for Americans.” “A frustration”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“The hunter-gatherer lifestyle worked at least tolerably well for the nearly 100,000-year history of behaviorally modern humans. Everybody in the world was a hunter-gatherer until the local origins of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, and nobody in the world lived under a state government until 5,400 years ago. The lessons from all those experiments in child-rearing that lasted for such a long time are worth considering seriously.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“Factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate an adaptive behavior. At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“Chauncey Starr expressed it, “We are loath to let others do unto us what we happily do to ourselves.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“The two populations with the next two lowest salt intakes, Brazil’s Xingu Indians and Papua New Guinea Highlanders of the Asaro Valley, had the next two lowest blood pressures (100 over 62, and 108 over 63).”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“Based on such evidence, archaeologists infer that chiefdoms began to arise locally by around 5500 BC.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“Yet psychologists base most of their generalizations about human nature on studies of our own narrow and atypical slice of human diversity. Among the human subjects studied in a sample of papers from the top psychology journals surveyed in the year 2008, 96% were from Westernized industrial countries (North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel), 68% were from the U.S. in particular, and up to 80% were college undergraduates enrolled in psychology courses, i.e., not even typical of their own national societies. That is, as social scientists Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan express it, most of our understanding of human psychology is based on subjects who may be described by the acronym WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. Most subjects also appear to be literally weird by the standards of world cultural variation, because they prove to be outliers in many studies of cultural phenomena that have sampled world variation more broadly.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“One New Guinea friend surprised me by telling me that what she most likes about life in the U.S. is its “anonymity.” She explained that anonymity means to her the freedom to step away from the social bonds that make life in New Guinea emotionally full, but also confining. To my friend, anonymity includes the freedom to be alone, to walk alone, to have privacy, to express oneself, to debate openly, to hold unconventional views, to be more immune to peer pressures, and not to have one’s every action scrutinized and discussed. It means the freedom to sit in a café on a crowded street and read a newspaper in peace, without being besieged by acquaintances asking for help with their problems. It means the freedom of Americans to advance themselves as individuals, with much less obligation to share their earnings with all their relatives than in New Guinea.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“The population that I already mentioned as having the world’s lowest recorded salt intake, Brazil’s Yanomamo Indians, also had the world’s lowest average blood pressure, an astonishingly low 96 over 61.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“Religion is a set of traits distinguishing a human social group sharing those traits from other groups not sharing those traits in identical form. Included among those shared traits is always one or more, often all three, out of three traits: supernatural explanation, defusing anxiety about uncontrollable dangers through ritual, and offering comfort for life’s pains and the prospect of death. Religions other than early ones became co-opted to promote standardized organization, political obedience, tolerance of strangers belonging to one’s own religion, and justification of wars against groups holding other religions.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“suggests that tribes were emerging in some areas by at least 13,000 years ago. In recent times tribes have still been widespread in parts of New Guinea and Amazonia.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“The first state arose in the Fertile Crescent around 3400 BC, and others”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“transhumance—i.e., moving livestock seasonally between different altitudes in order to follow the growth of grass at higher elevations as the season advances.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“That need for police and laws and moral commandments to be nice to strangers doesn’t arise in tiny societies, in which everyone knows everyone else.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“proposed as appropriate compensation. This reminds me”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“It’s the exclusive home of 1,000 of the world’s approximately 7,000 languages. It holds the largest number of societies that even in modern times still lay beyond the control of state government or were only recently influenced by state government. Its populations span a range of traditional lifestyles, from nomadic hunter-gatherers, seafarers, and lowland sago specialists to settled Highland farmers, composing groups ranging from a few dozen to 200,000 people.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

“As we shall see, even traditional societies that could have been self-sufficient usually chose not to be so and instead preferred to acquire by trade some objects that they could have obtained or produced for themselves.”
― Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?