Quotes from Jared Diamond

Hence it may have been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilization.

Polynesians and Aztecs developed dog breeds specifically raised for food.

An example of a much more difficult invention is writing, which does not suggest itself by observation of any natural material. As we saw in Chapter 12, it had only a few independent origins, and the alphabet arose apparently only once in world history.

truth: the winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were often merely those bearing the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies.

Dat wil zeggen dat de problemen van Montana voor het grootste deel niet eenvoudigweg kunnen worden toegeschreven aan zelfzuchtige booswichten die willens en wetens profiteren van hun buren. In plaats daarvan zijn het conflicten tusseen mensen die vanuit hun achtergrond en normen kiezen voor een manier van doen die verschilt van die waar mensen met een andere achtergrond en andere waarden voor kiezen.

climate. Perhaps

Inventors often have to persist at their tinkering for a long time in the absence of public demand, because early models perform too poorly to be useful.

Tasmanya'n?n Avrupal? kaÅŸiflerce MS 1642 y?l?nda ilk keÅŸfedildiÄŸi zamanki taÅŸ teknolojisi,Yukar? Avrupa'n?n on binlerce y?l önce Yontma TaÅŸ Ça??'ndaki teknolojisinden daha basitti.

One reason why technology tends to catalyze itself is that advances depend upon previous mastery of simpler problems.

La historia siguió trayectorias distintas para diferentes pueblos debido a las diferencias existentes en los entornos de los pueblos, no debido a diferencias biológicas entre los propios pueblos».

Perhaps cold climates require one to be more technologically inventive to survive, because one must build a warm home and make warm clothing, whereas one can survive in the tropics with simpler housing and no clothing. Or the argument can be reversed to reach the same conclusion: the long winters at high latitudes leave people with much time in which to sit indoors and invent.

This table is sure to horrify any knowledgeable scholar

A typical American fast-food restaurant meal would include chicken (first domesticated in China) and potatoes (from the Andes) or corn (from Mexico), seasoned with black pepper (from India) and washed down with a cup of coffee (of Ethiopian origin).

In this long history of accelerating development, one can single out two especially significant jumps. The first, occurring between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, probably was made possible by genetic changes in our bodies: namely, by evolution of the modern anatomy permitting modern speech or modern brain function, or both. That jump led to bone tools, single-purpose stone tools, and compound tools.

Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European guns and swords.

That news was enough to induce 900 Maori to sail to the Chathams. The outcome clearly illustrates how environments can affect economy, technology, political organization, and fighting skills within a short time.

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them. Part

This will be a frequent dilemma for historians trying to apply the comparative method to problems of human history: apparently too many potentially independent variables, and far too few separate outcomes to establish those variables' importance statistically.

Larger populations mean more inventors and more competing societies.

diseases represent evolution in progress, and microbes adapt by natural selection to new hosts and vectors.

This bidirectional link between food production and population density explains the paradox that food production, while increasing the quantity of edible calories per acre, left the food producers less well nourished than the hunter-gatherers whom they succeeded. That paradox developed because human population densities rose slightly more steeply than did the availability of food.

I do not mean to imply, however, that the role of disease in history was confined to paving the way for European expansion. Malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases of tropical Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea furnished the most important obstacle to European colonization of those tropical areas.

signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively.

it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it. While nomads and tribespeople occasionally defeat organized governments and religions, the trend over the past 13,000 years has been for the nomads and tribespeople to lose.