Quotes from Jared Diamond

we can recognize at least six groups of reasons for failed domestication.

China's leaders who mandated family planning long before overpopulation in China could reach Rwandan levels. Those admirable

Similarly, hippos, as four ton vegetarians, would be great barnyard animals if they weren't so dangerous. They kill more people each year than do any other African mammals, including even lions.

China's leaders who mandated family planning long before overpopulation in China could reach Rwandan levels.

human population densities were gradually rising throughout the late Pleistocene anyway, thanks to improvements in human technology for collecting and processing wild foods. As population densities rose, food production became increasingly favored because it provided the increased food outputs needed to feed all those people.

Zebras have the unpleasant habit of biting a person and not letting go. They thereby injure even more American zookeepers each year than do tigers! Zebras are also virtually impossible to lasso with a rope—even for cowboys who win rodeo championships by lassoing horses—because of their unfailing ability to watch the rope noose fly toward them and then to duck their head out of the way.

When supernatural beliefs gained those functions and became institutionalized, they were thereby transformed into what we term a religion.

What is it that promotes an invention's acceptance by a society?

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Who today remembers that gasoline, the fuel of modern civilization, originated as yet another invention in search of a use?

Without diffusion, fewer technologies are acquired, and more existing technologies are lost.

BECAUSE TECHNOLOGY BEGETS more technology, the importance of an invention's diffusion potentially exceeds the importance of the original invention.

Humans and most animal species make an unhappy marriage, for one or more of many possible reasons: the animal's diet, growth rate, mating habits, disposition, tendency to panic, and several distinct features of social organization. Only a small percentage of wild mammal species ended up in happy marriages with humans, by virtue of compatibility on all those separate counts.

Consequences are that heavy TV viewers trust other people less, and join fewer voluntary organizations, than do people who are not heavy TV viewers. Before blaming TV-viewing for those behaviors, one might object: which is the cause and which is the result, or are the two sets of phenomena just correlated without either being the cause of the other?

Naturally, what makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy. Fanaticism in war, of the type that drove recorded Christian and Islamic conquests, was probably unknown on Earth until chiefdoms and especially states emerged within the last 6,000 years.

The Americas span a much greater distance north–south (9,000 miles) than east–west: only 3,000 miles at the widest, narrowing to a mere 40 miles at the Isthmus of Panama. That is, the major axis of the Americas is north–south. The same is also true, though to a less extreme degree, for Africa. In contrast, the major axis of Eurasia is east–west. What effect, if any, did those differences in the orientation of the continents' axes have on human history?

Thanks to their mastery of horses and rifles, the Plains Indians of North America, the Araucanian Indians of southern Chile, and the Pampas Indians of Argentina fought off invading whites longer than did any other Native Americans, succumbing only to massive army operations by white governments in the 1870s and 1880s.

these differences between the Fertile Crescent, New Guinea, and the eastern United States followed straightforwardly from the differing suites of wild plant and animal species available for domestication, not from limitations of the peoples themselves.

Different rates of development on different continents, from 11,000 B.C. to A.D. 1500, were what led to the technological and political inequalities of A.D. 1500.

Sex in social mammals is generally carried out in public, before the gazes of other members of the troop.

the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu concluded that Europeans and Christianity posed a threat to the stability of the shogunate and Japan. (In retrospect, when one considers how European military intervention followed the arrival of apparently innocent traders and missionaries in China, India, and many other countries, the threat foreseen by Ieyasu was real.)

and their implication for southeastern Polynesian prehistory

Education is a process involving two sets of participants who supposedly play different roles: teachers who impart knowledge to students, and students who absorb knowledge from teachers. In fact, as every open-minded teacher discovers, education is also about students imparting knowledge to their teachers, by challenging the teachers' assumptions and by asking questions that the teachers hadn't previously thought of.

Perhaps the biggest of these unsolved problems is to establish human history as a historical science, on a par with recognized historical sciences such as evolutionary biology, geology, and climatology. The study of human history does pose real difficulties, but those recognized historical sciences encounter some of the same challenges. Hence the methods developed in some of these other fields may also prove useful in the field of human history.