Quotes from Jared Diamond

Peoples of the Fertile Crescent domesticated local plants much earlier. They domesticated far more species, domesticated far more productive or valuable species, domesticated a much wider range of types of crops, developed intensified food production and dense human populations more rapidly, and as a result entered the modern world with more advanced technology, more complex political organization, and more epidemic diseases with which to infect other peoples.

Not a trace of its use for literature has survived. The Iliad and Odyssey were composed and transmitted by nonliterate bards for nonliterate listeners, and not committed to writing until the development of the Greek alphabet hundreds of years later.

One suggested function of the first gardens of nearly 11,000 years ago was to provide a reliable reserve larder as insurance in case wild food supplies failed.

To sustain themselves, they need a human population that is sufficiently numerous, and sufficiently densely packed, that a numerous new crop of susceptible children is available for infection by the time the disease would otherwise be waning. Hence measles and similar diseases are also known as crowd diseases.

there are current linguistic reverberations—especially the impending disappearance of most of the modern world's 6,000 surviving languages, becoming replaced by English, Chinese, Russian, and a few other languages whose numbers of speakers have increased enormously in recent centuries.

We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure.

For instance, the Karimui Basin of the New Guinea highlands, where I worked in the 1960s, was occupied by an isolated population of a few thousand people, suffering from the world's highest incidence of leprosy—about 40 percent! Finally, small human populations are also susceptible to nonfatal infections against which we don't develop immunity, with the result that the same person can become reinfected after recovering. That happens with hookworm and many other parasites.

I am Nestor's delicious drinking cup. Whoever drinks from this cup swiftly will the desire of fair-crowned Aphrodite seize him.

Why does Japan now dominate the world market for transistorized electronic consumer products, to a degree that damages the United States's balance of payments with Japan, even though transistors were invented and patented in the United States? Because Sony bought transistor licensing rights from Western Electric at a time when the American electronics consumer industry was churning out vacuum tube models and reluctant to compete with its own products.

the official religions and patriotic fervor of many states make their troops willing to fight suicidally. The latter willingness is one so strongly programmed into us citizens of modern states, by our schools and churches and governments, that we forget what a radical break it marks with previous human history.

That's how an Aerolineas Argentinas airplane, stopping in Lima (Peru) in 1991, managed to deliver dozens of cholera-infected people that same day to my city of Los Angeles, over 3,000 miles from Lima. The explosive increase in world travel by Americans, and in immigration to the United States, is turning us into another melting pot—this time, of microbes that we previously dismissed as just causing exotic diseases in far-off countries.

THE BIGGEST POPULATION SHIFT OF MODERN TIMES HAS been the colonization of the New World by Europeans, and the resulting conquest, numerical reduction, or complete disappearance of most groups of Native Americans

Atahuallpa was absolute monarch of the largest and most advanced state in the New World, while Pizarro represented the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (also known as King Charles I of Spain), monarch of the most powerful state in Europe.

El fanatismo en la guerra, del tipo que impulsó las conquistas cristianas e islámicas que conocemos por la historia, fue probablemente desconocido en la Tierra hasta el surgimiento de las jefaturas y, sobre todo, de los estados en los últimos 6.000 años.

Human Disease Animal with Most Closely Related Pathogen Measles cattle (rinderpest) Tuberculosis cattle Smallpox cattle (cowpox) or other livestock with related pox viruses Flu pigs and ducks Pertussis pigs, dogs Falciparum malaria birds (chickens and ducks?)

food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel.

For example, typhus was initially transmitted between rats by rat fleas, which sufficed for a while to transfer typhus from rats to humans. Eventually, typhus microbes discovered that human body lice offered a much more efficient method of traveling directly between humans. Now that Americans have mostly deloused themselves, typhus has discovered a new route into us: by infecting eastern North American flying squirrels and then transferring to people whose attics harbor flying squirrels.

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.

As a result of that confined distribution, peoples who pride themselves on being civilized have always viewed writing as the sharpest distinction raising them above "barbarians" or "savages.

Different peoples acquired food production at different times in prehistory.

Cumulative mortalities of these previously unexposed peoples from Eurasian germs ranged from 50 percent to 100 percent. For instance, the Indian population of Hispaniola declined from around 8 million, when Columbus arrived in A.D. 1492, to zero by 1535.

THE DISCIPLINE OF history is generally not considered to be a science, but something closer to the humanities. At best, history is classified among the social sciences, of which it rates as the least scientific.

Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates.

As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing's main function was "to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.