The World Until Yesterday

^{Plate 37. Modern warfare: the Hiroshima atomic bomb cloud of August 6, 1945. The American soldiers who dropped the bomb did not personally know their victims and did not look them in the face as they were killing them. The 100,000 Japanese killed at Hiroshima represent the highest one-day death toll in modern warfare, and constituted 0.1% of Japan’s population at that time. That is, large modern populations are associated with high absolute death tolls in modern warfare, but the methods of traditional warfare can result in much higher proportional death tolls. (Pages 127 and 142)}

^{Plate 38. Traditional transport of children commonly places the child in immediate physical contact with the care-giver, vertically erect, looking forward, and thus seeing the same field of view as the caregiver. This is a Pume Indian baby from Venezuela being carried by an older sister. (Pages 185, 188, and 201)}

^{Plate 39. Modern transport of children often removes the child from physical contact with the care-giver, and places the child looking backwards and reclining horizontally rather than vertically erect. This is an American baby being pushed in a baby carriage by its mother. (Page 184)}

^{Plates 40 and 41. The composers Richard Strauss (left) and Giuseppe Verdi (right) learned how to make the best use of their musical talents as they changed with age. The results were among their greatest compositions: Strauss’s Four Last Songs, and Verdi’s operas Otello and Falstaff, completed at ages 84, 74, and 80, respectively. (Page 239)}

^{Plate 42. Traditional dangers: a man climbing a tree to harvest acai berries in Brazil. Falling out of a tree, or being struck by a falling tree, is a major hazard in many traditional societies. (Page 280)}

^{Plate 43. Traditional dangers: a large crocodile that was killed after it had killed people in Indonesia. Wild animals are major hazards in most traditional societies. (Page 280)}

^{Plate 44. Modern dangers: car crashes are a major hazard of modern life. (Page 279)}

^{Plate 45. Risk management: Harvard University’s endowment principal and income crashed during the worldwide financial meltdown of 2008-2009. Harvard’s investment managers should have followed the risk management strategy of peasant farmers, who maximize long-term time-averaged yields only insofar as that is compatible with maintaining yields above a certain critical level. (Page 307)}

^{Plate 46. A dowser, a person who claims that rotation of a forked stick can reveal the presence of hidden underground water for land-owners wanting to know where to dig a well. Dowsers illustrate our tendency to resort to rituals in situations whose outcomes are hard to predict. (Page 342)}

^{Plate 47. Vanishing languages: Sophie Borodkin (died January 2008), the last speaker of Eyak, a distinctive Native American language formerly spoken in Alaska. (Page 397)}

ALSO BY JARED DIAMOND

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Copyright

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First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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Copyright © Jared Diamond, 2012

All rights reserved

Photograph credits appear on page 499.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Diamond, Jared M.

The world until yesterday : what can we learn from traditional societies? / Jared Diamond.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60600-1

1. Dani (New Guinean people)—History. 2. Dani (New Guinean people)—Social life and customs. 3. Dani (New Guinean people)—Cultural assimilation. 4. Social evolution—Papua New Guinea. 5. Social change—Papua New Guinea. 6. Papua New Guinea—Social life and customs. I. Title.

DU744.35.D32D53 2013

305.89’912—dc23

2012018386

Designed by Nancy Resnick

Maps by Matt Zebrowski

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