Quotes from Jared Diamond

the wheats offered the additional advantage of a high protein content, 8–14 percent. In contrast, the most important cereal crops of eastern Asia and of the New World—rice and corn, respectively—had a lower protein content that posed significant nutritional problems. THOSE

Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.

Those protohumans are generally known as Australopithecus africanus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus, which apparently evolved into each other in that sequence.

My best-case scenario for the future is that China's government will recognize that its environmental problems pose an even graver threat that did its problem of population growth. It may then conclude that China's interests require environmental policies as bold, and as effectively carried out, as its family planning policies.

Why did history unfold differently on different continents?

explanation of causes

In case you're squeamish and consider rats inedible, I still recall, from my years of living in England in the late 1950s, recipes for creamed laboratory rat that my British biologist friends who kept them for experiments also used to supplement their diet during their years of wartime food rationing.

Michael Shermer in the paper "Exorcising Laplace's demon: Chaos and antichaos, history and metahistory," History and Theory 34:59–83 (1995). Shermer's

Two contrasting explanations suggest themselves: problems with the local people, or problems with the locally available wild plants.

Our modern acorn squashes and summer squashes are derived from those American squashes domesticated thousands of years ago.

If you've been puzzled by the name !Kung Bushman, the exclamation mark is not an expression of premature astonishment; it's just how linguists denote a click.)

A Maori conqueror explained, "We took possession…in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people.

AUTHORS ARE REGULARLY asked by journalists to summarize a long book in one sentence. For this book, here is such a sentence: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.

Moriori survivor recalled, "[The Maori] commenced to kill us like sheep….

A mere dozen species account for over 80 percent of the modern world's annual tonnage of all crops. Those dozen blockbusters are the cereals wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum; the pulse soybean; the roots or tubers potato, manioc, and sweet potato; the sugar sources sugarcane and sugar beet; and the fruit banana.

Farmers tend to breathe out nastier germs, to own better weapons and armor, to own more-powerful technology in general, and to live under centralized governments with literate elites better able to wage wars of conquest.

That's why the question what men are good for continues to be debated within our societies, as well as between anthropologists

Societies with effective conflict resolution, sound decision making, and harmonious economic redistribution can develop better technology, concentrate their military power, seize larger and more productive territories, and crush autonomous smaller societies one by one.

En toda América, las enfermedades introducidas con los europeos se propagaron de una tribu a otra mucho antes que los propios europeos, causando la muerte de aproximadamente el 95 por ciento de la población indígena americana precolombina.

IN SHORT, SOME COUNTRIES are much richer than are other countries. The reasons why are multiple and complicated. If you insist on a simple answer to this important question, you'll have to find some place in the universe to inhabit other than our planet Earth, where life is really complicated.

Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have also been decisive shapers of history. Until World War II, more victims of war died of war-borne microbes than of battle wounds. All those military histories glorifying great generals oversimplify the ego-deflating 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.

large societies cannot function with band organization and instead are complex kleptocracies.

Those parasites pass to a person from an eaten animal, but the virus causing laughing sickness (kuru) in the New Guinea highlands used to pass to a person from another person who was eaten. It was transmitted by cannibalism, when highland babies made the fatal mistake of licking their fingers after playing with raw brains that their mothers had just cut out of dead kuru victims awaiting cooking.

Thus, questions of the animal origins of human disease lie behind the broadest pattern of human history, and behind some of the most important issues in human health today. (Think of AIDS, an explosively spreading human disease that appears to have evolved from a virus resident in wild African monkeys.) This