Quotes from Jared Diamond

A horizontal arrow indicates that the attribute varies between less and more complex societies of that type.

Today, 28% of the Dominican Republic is still forested, but only 1% of Haiti.

Evidently, Austronesian settlers in the New Guinea region got the idea of "tattooing" their pots, perhaps inspired by geometric designs that they had already been using on their bark cloth and body tattoos. This style is termed Lapita pottery, after an archaeological site named Lapita, where it was described.

Localities distributed east and west of each other at the same latitude share exactly the same day length and its seasonal variations. To a lesser degree, they also tend to share similar diseases, regimes of temperature and rainfall, and habitats or biomes (types of vegetation).

For example, Portugal, northern Iran, and Japan, all located at about the same latitude but lying successively 4,000 miles east or west of each other, are more similar to each other in climate than each is to a location lying even a mere 1,000 miles due south.

Of course, those technological and political differences as of A.D. 1500 were the immediate cause of the modern world's inequalities. Empires with steel weapons were able to conquer or exterminate tribes with weapons of stone and wood. How, though, did the world get to be the way it was in A.D. 1500?

The slaughter at Gallipoli symbolized the national pride of Australians, now fighting for their British motherland as Australians, not as Victorians or Tasmanians or South Australians—and the emotional dedication with which Australians publicly identified themselves as loyal British subjects.

Australia / New Guinea today has no equally large mammals, in fact no mammal larger than 100-pound kangaroos. But Australia / New Guinea formerly had its own suite of diverse big mammals, including giant kangaroos, rhinolike marsupials called diprotodonts and reaching the size of a cow, and a marsupial "leopard." It also formerly had a 400-pound ostrichlike flightless bird, plus some impressively big reptiles, including a one-ton lizard, a giant python, and land-dwelling crocodiles.

Thus, we can finally rephrase the question about the modern world's inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history's broadest pattern and my book's subject.

Hence the greatly increased life expectancy brought by modern medicine may have contributed to the recently accelerating pace of invention.

Part of the solution to that problem was for one person, the chief, to exercise a monopoly on the right to use force.

In a society that espouses tolerance, it's amazing how intolerant some folks are to animal agriculture and what comes with producing food.

it takes around 10,000 pounds of corn to grow a 1,000-pound cow. If instead you want to grow 1,000 pounds of carnivore, you have to feed it 10,000 pounds of herbivore grown on 100,000 pounds of corn.

That contrast between the immediate virtues of wheat and barley and the difficulties posed by teosinte may have been a significant factor in the differing developments of New World and Eurasian human societies.

throughout human history farmers have tended to despise hunter-gatherers as primitive, hunter-gatherers have despised farmers as ignorant, and herders have despised both.

The scientific outlook is a unique feature of post-Renaissance European society that has contributed heavily to its modern technological preeminence.

They suggest that there are two contrasting types of approaches to solving environmental problems, which we may term the bottom-up and the top-down approach.

Religions vary greatly in their relation to technological innovation: some branches of Judaism and Christianity are claimed to be especially compatible with it, while some branches of Islam, Hinduism, and Brahmanism may be especially incompatible with it.

The great exception to this rule of the recent melting pot is the world's most populous nation, China. Today, China appears politically, culturally, and linguistically monolithic, at least to laypeople.

In that spirit, a lower-impact society is the most impossible scenario for our future—except for all other conceivable scenarios.

Thus, Norse society's structure created a conflict between the short-term interests of those in power, and the long-term interests of the society as a whole. Much of what the chiefs and clergy valued proved eventually harmful to the society. Yet the society's values were at the root of its strengths as well as of its weaknesses. The Greenland Norse did succeed in creating a unique form of European society, and in surviving for 450 years as Europe's most remote outpost.

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

The overall picture for Easter is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct. Immediate consequences for the islanders were losses of raw materials, losses of wild-caught foods, and decreased crop yields.

Japan's most important archaeological monuments—the 158 gigantic kofun tombs constructed between A.D. 300 and 686, and thought to contain the remains of ancestral emperors and their families—are still the property of the Imperial Household Agency. Excavation of the tombs is forbidden because it would constitute desecration—and it might also shed undesired light on where Japan's imperial family really came from (e.g., perhaps Korea?).