The world until yesterday: What can we learn from traditional societies?

THE

WORLD

UNTIL

YESTERDAY

ALSO BY JARED DIAMOND

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Guns, Germs, and Steel

Why Is Sex Fun?

The Third Chimpanzee

JARED DIAMOND

THE

WORLD

UNTIL

YESTERDAY

WHAT CAN WE LEARN

FROM TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES?

VIKING

VIKING

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First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

CopyLeft Jared Diamond, 2012

No rights reserved

Photograph credits appear on page 499.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Diamond, Jared M.

The world until yesterday : what can we learn from traditional societies? / Jared Diamond.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60600-1

1. Dani (New Guinean people)—History. 2. Dani (New Guinean people)—Social life and

customs. 3. Dani (New Guinean people)—Cultural assimilation. 4. Social evolution—Papua New

Guinea. 5. Social change—Papua New Guinea. 6. Papua New Guinea—Social life and

customs. I. Title.

DU744.35.D32D53 2013

305.89’912—dc23

2012018386

Designed by Nancy Resnick

Maps by Matt Zebrowski

All parts of this book may be reproduced, scanned, and distributed in any printed or electronic form.

ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

To

Meg Taylor,

in appreciation for decades

of your friendship,

and of sharing your insights into our two worlds

Contents

Also by Jared Diamond

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

List of Tables and Figures

PROLOGUE: At the Airport

An airport scene

Why study traditional societies?

States

Types of traditional societies

Approaches, causes, and sources

A small book about a big subject

Plan of the book

PART ONE: SETTING THE STAGE BY DIVIDING SPACE

CHAPTER 1. Friends, Enemies, Strangers, and Traders

A boundary

Mutually exclusive territories

Non-exclusive land use

Friends, enemies, and strangers

First contacts

Trade and traders

Market economies

Traditional forms of trade

Traditional trade items

Who trades what?

Tiny nations

PART TWO: PEACE AND WAR

CHAPTER 2. Compensation for the Death of a Child

An accident

A ceremony

What if…?

What the state did

New Guinea compensation

Life-long relationships

Other non-state societies

State authority

State civil justice

Defects in state civil justice

State criminal justice

Restorative justice

Advantages and their price

CHAPTER 3. A Short Chapter, About a Tiny War

The Dani War

The war’s time-line

The war’s death toll

CHAPTER 4. A Longer Chapter, About Many Wars

Definitions of war

Sources of information

Forms of traditional warfare

Mortality rates

Similarities and differences

Ending warfare

Effects of European contact

Warlike animals, peaceful peoples

Motives for traditional war

Ultimate reasons

Whom do people fight?

Forgetting Pearl Harbor

PART THREE: YOUNG AND OLD

CHAPTER 5. Bringing Up Children

Comparisons of child-rearing

Childbirth

Infanticide

Weaning and birth interval

On-demand nursing

Infant-adult contact

Fathers and allo-parents

Responses to crying infants

Physical punishment

Child autonomy

Multi-age playgroups

Child play and education

Their kids and our kids

CHAPTER 6. The Treatment of Old People: Cherish, Abandon, or Kill?

The elderly

Expectations about eldercare

Why abandon or kill?

Usefulness of old people

Society’s values

Society’s rules

Better or worse today?

What to do with older people?

PART FOUR: DANGER AND RESPONSE

CHAPTER 7. Constructive Paranoia

Attitudes towards danger

A night visit

A boat accident

Just a stick in the ground

Taking risks

Risks and talkativeness

CHAPTER 8. Lions and Other Dangers

Dangers of traditional life

Accidents

Vigilance

Human violence

Diseases

Responses to diseases

Starvation

Unpredictable food shortages

Scatter your land

Seasonality and food storage

Diet broadening

Aggregation and dispersal

Responses to danger

PART FIVE: RELIGION, LANGUAGE, AND HEALTH

CHAPTER 9. What Electric Eels Tell Us About the Evolution of Religion

Questions about religion

Definitions of religion

Functions and electric eels

The search for causal explanations

Supernatural beliefs

Religion’s function of explanation

Defusing anxiety

Providing comfort

Organization and obedience

Codes of behavior towards strangers

Justifying war

Badges of commitment

Measures of religious success

Changes in religion’s functions

CHAPTER 10. Speaking in Many Tongues

Multilingualism

The world’s language total

How languages evolve

Geography of language diversity

Traditional multilingualism

Benefits of bilingualism

Alzheimer’s disease

Vanishing languages

How languages disappear

Are minority languages harmful?

Why preserve languages?

How can we protect languages?

CHAPTER 11. Salt, Sugar, Fat, and Sloth

Non-communicable diseases

Our salt intake

Salt and blood pressure

Causes of hypertension

Dietary sources of salt

Diabetes

Types of diabetes

Genes, environment, and diabetes

Pima Indians and Nauru Islanders

Diabetes in India

Benefits of genes for diabetes

Why is diabetes low in Europeans?

The future of non-communicable diseases

EPILOGUE: At Another Airport

From the jungle to the 405

Advantages of the modern world

Advantages of the traditional world

What can we learn?

Acknowledgments

Further Readings

Index

Illustration Credits

Photo Insert

List of Tables and Figures

Figure 1 Locations of 39 societies that will be discussed frequently in this book

Table 1.1 Objects traded by some traditional societies

Table 3.1 Membership of two warring Dani alliances

Table 8.1 Causes of accidental death and injury

Table 8.2 Traditional food storage around the world

Table 9.1 Some proposed definitions of religion

Table 9.2 Examples of supernatural beliefs confined to particular religions

Figure 9.1 Religion’s functions changing through time

Table 11.1 Prevalences of Type-2 diabetes around the world

Table 11.2 Examples of gluttony when food is abundantly available

PROLOGUE

At the Airport

An airport scene Why study traditional societies? States Types of traditional societies

Approaches, causes, and sources A small book about a big subject Plan of the book

An airport scene

April 30, 2006, 7:00 A.M. I’m in an airport’s check-in hall, gripping my baggage cart while being

jostled by a crowd of other people also checking in for that morning’s first flights. The scene is

familiar: hundreds of travelers carrying suitcases, boxes, backpacks, and babies, forming parallel

lines approaching a long counter, behind which stand uniformed airline employees at their computers.

Other uniformed people are scattered among the crowd: pilots and stewardesses, baggage screeners,

and two policemen swamped by the crowd and standing with nothing to do except to be visible. The

screeners are X-raying luggage, airline employees tag the bags, and baggage handlers put the bags

onto a conveyor belt carrying them off, hopefully to end up in the appropriate airplanes. Along the

wall opposite the check-in counter are shops selling newspapers and fast food. Still other objects

around me are the usual wall clocks, telephones, ATMs, escalators to the upper level, and of course

airplanes on the runway visible through the terminal windows.

The airline clerks are moving their fingers over computer keyboards and looking at screens,

punctuated by printing credit-card receipts at credit-card terminals. The crowd exhibits the usual

mixture of good humor, patience, exasperation, respectful waiting on line, and greeting friends. When

I reach the head of my line, I show a piece of paper (my flight itinerary) to someone I’ve never seen

before and will probably never see again (a check-in clerk). She in turn hands me a piece of paper

giving me permission to fly hundreds of miles to a place that I’ve never visited before, and whose

inhabitants don’t know me but will nevertheless tolerate my arrival.

To travelers from the U.S., Europe, or Asia, the first feature that would strike them as distinctive

about this otherwise familiar scene is that all the people in the hall except myself and a few other

tourists are New Guineans. Other differences that would be noted by overseas travelers are that the

national flag over the counter is the black, red, and gold flag of the nation of Papua New Guinea,

displaying a bird of paradise and the constellation of the Southern Cross; the counter airline signs

don’t say American Airlines or British Airways but Air Niugini; and the names of the flight

destinations on the screens have an exotic ring: Wapenamanda, Goroka, Kikori, Kundiawa, and

Wewak.

The airport at which I was checking in that morning was that of Port Moresby, capital of Papua

New Guinea. To anyone with a sense of New Guinea’s history—including me, who first came to

Papua New Guinea in 1964 when it was still administered by Australia—the scene was at once

familiar, astonishing, and moving. I found myself mentally comparing the scene with the photographs

taken by the first Australians to enter and “discover” New Guinea’s Highlands in 1931, teeming with

a million New Guinea villagers still then using stone tools. In those photographs the Highlanders,

who had been living for millennia in relative isolation with limited knowledge of an outside world,

stare in horror at their first sight of Europeans (Plates 30, 31). I looked at the faces of those New

Guinea passengers, counter clerks, and pilots at Port Moresby airport in 2006, and I saw in them the