This article by Jared Diamond originally appeared in Discover Magazine in May, 1987.#

One of the core things that you read about when you read things by Jared Diamond is that all your assumptions are wrong. For everything that most people think makes humans special, The Third Chimpanzee has a reason why it is not so and there are actually many instances of this in the animal kingdom, at least in some form. For every reason that you thought Europeans were great, Guns, Germs, and Steel (I read this before I blogged books) has a reason why our advantages were influenced by things that were not controllable.

This article is no exception. It discusses one of Diamond's biggest pet peeves: That agriculture was the best thing to ever happened to our civilization.

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

He talks about all the arguments from the progressivist side and how it is incredibly difficult to directly test these claims. Are we really better than hunter-gatherers? The progressivist think that it is silly to even ask the question, so they don't feel the need to prove it. Jared answers:

While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

But as he says, studying today's so-called primitive people is not exactly a measure of those who moved from hunter-gather lifestyles to one based on agriculture. This is where archaeology and paleopathology comes in handy.

One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9" for men, 5' 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3" for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

So, why would our ancestors have done it? One opinion: They were looking at quantity not quality.

The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field,Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."

You see the same thing happening in Africa. There's not enough food for the children that are there, yet there incredible birth rates. Same with other poor populations. This should also bring to your mind those in the Western world who are so focused on increasing food supplies and growing larger and larger -- are we trading quality for quantity?

So, agriculture destroyed the health of our ancestors and then it made it worse by promoting disease and another epidemic problem: class divisions.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. [...]

Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an élite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be iimproted from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?

So what does this have to do with today?

At this point it's instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering façade, and that have so far eluded us?

This is very much the theme of Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. There are so many assumptions about our "success" and all the "advantages" we have, but very little accountability of whether they are in fact advantages. Something to think about!

Halley Suitt writes about the sexiness of alcohol and smoking.#

There used to be something sexy about smoking, but notice culturally, at least in the United States, it's gotten about as sexy as leprosy. Smokers are treated like outcasts in offices, restaurants, just about everywhere. There has been such a cultural assassination of smoking that it's gone from being cool (watch old movies) to absolutely not cool. I think this will happen for alcohol in the next few decades.

Some may be intrigued to learn, if they have not already, that the purpose of alcohol and other drugs has always been for sex appeal. I quote from Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee:

Page after page of ads flaunted the use of cigarettes or strong alcohol, and hinted at their benefits. There were even pictures of young people smoking in the presence of attractive members of the opposite sex, as if to imply that smoking too brought sexual opportunities. Yet any nonsmoker who has ever been kissed by (or tried to kiss) a smoker knows how severely the smoker's bad breath compromises his or her sex appeal. The ads paradoxically implied not just sexual benefits but also platonic friendships, business opportunities, vigor, health, and happiness, when the direct conclusion to be drawn from the ads was actually the reverse. [pg. 195]

The idea is that substance abuse is very much like art. It is a signal to potential mates: "Look how rich I am, I can buy things that have no use and still have money for food"; or, the case of substance abuse: "Look how strong I am, even when I poison myself regularly I am still strong." These indicator signals are very common in animals. For example, zebras have a dance that they do when they see lions. This dance takes a long time and puts them at a disadvantage to escape, but through evolution it has come to signal to a lion that the zebra is very fast and they should both not waste their energy running when the lion will surely lose. Like alcohol, the immediate effect is debilitating, but the overall effect of the signal is an advantage.

Jared notes that it is actually very important for an indicator signal to bring a disadvantage to the practicer so that it will have an actual meaning. For example, think of something incredibly cheap, anyone can get it easily, therefore it is not a useful indicator of wealth. Similarly, drinking water is not a sign of strength, as alcohol is.

Both art and chemical abuse are widespread human hallmarks characteristic of most known human societies. Both beg explanation, since it's not immediately obvious why they promote our survival through natural selection, or why they help us acquire mates through sexual selection. I argued earlier that art often serves as a valid indicator of an individual's superiority or status, since art requires skill to create and requires status or wealth to acquire. But those individuals perceived by their fellows as enjoying status thereby acquire enhanced access to resources and mates. I'm arguing now that humans seek status through many other costly display besides art, and that some of those displays (like jumping from towers, fast driving, and chemical abuse) are surprisingly dangerous. The former costly displays advertise status or wealth; the latter dangerous ones advertise that the displaying individual can master even such risks and hence must be superior. [pg. 203]

Tony S. writes about humans and "confidence limits."#

For us to be in the acceptable norm our population should be around 6 million people. This number seems a bit small to me. I would admit that we are overpopulated, but 1000 times overpopulated, pleeaasseeee! But on the other hand, how many other land species have a total population of 6 million? How many species come close to numbers in population? If our number are that far out of whack, what would it take to correct this situation?

"It is probably not unrealistic to say that nothing less than a full paradigm shift is required to get there from here," Fowler explained. "It requires changes in our thinking, belief systems and understanding of ourselves."

[...]

Rees explained that humanity has been inordinately successful. Unlike other species, humans can eat almost anything, adapt to any environment and develop technologies based on knowledge shared through written and spoken language.

[...]

It is obvious that with our population and our ability to consume, something will give out at some point. Either we will run out of resources to fed everyone - not that everyone eats now - or we will run out of space for us to live. Don't worry folks, I don't foresee this happening in the next 100 years. Our lifetime, isn't that all that really matters?

In The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond writes about this:#

On reflection, it is clear that the entire human species has been equally successful in recently escaping from the former controls on our numbers. We eliminated predation on us long ago; twentieth-century medicine has greatly reduced our mortality from infectious disease; and some of our leading behavioral techniques of population control, such as infanticide, chronic war, and sexual abstinence, have become socially unacceptable. Out population is now doubling about every thirty-five years. [...] the qualitative conclusion remains the same: no population can grow indefinitly.

Thus, our present ecological predicament has familiar animal precursors. Like many switching predators, we exterminate some prey species when we colonize a new environment or acquire new destructive power. Like some animal populations that suddenly escaped their former limits on growth, we risk destroying ourselves by destroying our resource base. [pg. 314]

The Third Chimpanzee is Jared Diamond's exploration of the what the 2% difference in human DNA and chimpanzee DNA changed in our structure. His hypothesis is that some of the traits that this 2% exploited are apparent in animals today and that the were small fundamental changes.#

What were those few key ingredients that made us human? Since our unique properties appeared so recently and involved so few changes, these properties or at least their precursors must already be present in animals. What are those animal precursors of art and language, of genocide and drug abuse? [pg. 3]

The book contains many interesting theories and stories about the human animal and describes many strange behaviours of animals we have yet to understand.

One of my favourite things that Jared talks about in this book is the striking similarity between animals and humans, yet the intense double standard of ethics with regards to those animals.#

[Next time you're at the zoo] ask yourself why those apes are on exhibit in cages, and why other apes are being used for medical experiments, while it's not permissible to do either of those things to humans. Suppose it turned out that chimp genes were 99.9 percent identical to our genes, and that the important differences between humans and chimps were due to just a few genes. Would you still think it's okay to put chimps in cages and to experiment on them? Consider those unfortunate mentally defective people who have much less capacity to solve problems, to care for themselves, to communicate, to engage in social relationships, and to feel pain that do apes. What is the logic that forbids medical experiments on those people, but not on apes?

You might answer that apes are "animals," while humans are humans, and that's enough. An ethical code for treating humans shouldn't be extended to an "animal," no matter how similar its genes are to ours, and no matter what its capacity for social relationships or feeling pain. That's an arbitrary but at least self-consistent answer that can't be lightly dismissed. [pg. 15-16]

Another thing that was intriguing in the book was the dismissal of many common myths about man's past. For example, his history as a great hunter of big game. This is a great romantic quote about this mythical past:#

As an example of the purple prose spawned by this men's locker-room mentality, consider the following account of human evolution by Robert Ardrey in his African Genesis: "In some scrawny troop of beleaguered not-yet-men on some scrawny forgotten plain a radian particle from an unknown source fractured a never-to-be-forgotten gene, and a primate carnivore was born. For better or for worse, for tragedy or for triumph, for ultimate glory or ultimate damnation, intelligence made alliance with the way of the killer, and Cain with his sticks and his stones and his quickly running feet emerged on the high savannah." What pure fantasy!

Western male writers and anthropologists aren't the only men with an exaggerated view of hunting. In New Guinea I've lived with real hunters, men who recently emerge from the Stone Age. Conversations at campfires go on for hours over each species of game animal, its habits, and how best to hunt it. To listen to my New Guinea friends, you would think that they eat fresh kangaroo for dinner every night and do little each day except hunt. In fact, when pressed for details, most New Guinea hunters admit that they have bagged only a few kangaroos in their whole lives. [pg. 39-40]

A large portion of the book is devouted to explaining the details of human sexuality and what is currently not understood about it.#

There is a large difference between human sexuality and physiology and that of apes.

Still other features of our life cycle differ far more drastically from those of apes than do our testes, yet the functions of those remaining novel features of ours remain hotly debated. We are unusual in having sex mainly in private and for fun, rather than mainly in public and only have the female is able to conceive. Ape females advertise the time when they are ovulating; human females conceal it even from themselves. While anatomists understand the value of men's moderate testis size, an explanation for men's relatively enormous penis still escapes us. [pg. 61]

This whole issue of testis size is very strange but apparently rather important to science.

The combined weight of the testes in the average man is about 1.5 ounces. This may boost the macho man's ego when he reflects on the slightly lower testis weight in a 450-pound male gorilla. BUt wait: our testes are dwarfed by the 4-ounce testes of a 100-pound male chimpanzee. Why is the gorilla so economical, and the chimp so well-endowed, compared to us?

The Theory of Testis Size is one of the triumphs of modern physical anthropology. By weighing the testes of thirty-tree primate species, British scientists identified two trends: species that copulate more often need bigger testes; and promiscuous species in which several males routinely copulate in quick sequence with one female need especially big testes (because the male that injects the most semen has the best chance of being the one to fertilize the egg.) [pg. 72]

The purpose of the relatively larger penis of human men still escapes physical anthropologists though.

Some of the other topics in this section are adultery, sexual compatibility and selection.

After explaining the peculiarities of the sexual life of humans, Jared then talks about how these things can be used to explain otherwise unexplained things about humans such as skin colour and eye colour that are particular to certain cultures.#

On the lack of a consistent theory of skin colour outside sexual selection.

With at least eight theories in the running, we can hardly claim to understand why people from sunny climates have dark skins. That in itself doesn't refute the idea that, somehow, natural selection caused the evolution of dark skins in sunny climates. After all, dark skins could have multiple advantages, which scientists may sort out someday. Instead, the heaviest objection to any theory based on natural selection is that the association between dark skins and sunny climates is a very imperfect one. Native peoples have very dark skins in some areas receiving relatively little sunlight, like Tasmania, while skin color is only medium in sunny areas of tropical Southeast Asia. No American Indians have black skins, not even in the sunniest parts of the New World. when one takes cloud cover into account, the world's most dimly lit areas, receiving a daily average of under 3.5 hours of sunlight, include parts of equatorial West Africa, South China, and Scandinavia, inhabited respectively by some of the world's blackest, yellowest, and palest peoples! Among the Solomon Islands, all of which share a similar climate, jet-black people and lighter people replace each other over short distances. Evidently, sunlight has not been the sole selective factor that influenced skin color. [pg. 115]

The idea is that rather than the Natural Selection of early Darwin, a new concept of Sexual Selection is used. Basically the Sexual Selection is when a sexual preference makes beings possessing some trait more likely to procreate and spread their genes. So, those attributes are promoted and continue through the generations.

Yet another one of the interesting topics in this book is the discussion of aging and why it is a good thing for humans to grow old, die, not be able to regenerate limbs and women to go through menopause, but with the qualification that the age we CAN live to is just right.#

Why it is important to have older persons in a hunter-gatherer society:

Slow aging is a crucial to the human life-style as are marriage, concealed ovulation, and the other life-cycle features that we've been discussing in the preceding chapters. That's because our life-style depends on transmitted information. As language evolved, far more information became available to us to pass on than previously. Until the invention of writing, old people acted as the repositories of that transmitted information and experience, just as they continue to do in tribal societies today. Under hunter-gatherer conditions, the knowledge possessed by even on person over the age of seventy could spell the difference between survival and starvation for a whole clan. Our long life span, therefore, was important for our rise from animal to human status. [pg. 123]

How evolution decides whether or not to support strong and comprehensive regeneration, a decision that is at the heart of our ability to live long lives:

The risk of death from predators is lower for birds than for mammals (because birds can escape by flying), and lower for turtles than for most other reptiles (because turtles are protected by a shell). Thus, birds and turtles stand to gain a lot from expensive repair mechanisms, compared to flightless mammals and shell-less reptiles that will soon be eaten by predators anyway. [...] The bird species most protected from predators are seabirds like petrels and albatrosses that nest on remote oceanic islands free of predators. Their leisurely life cycles rival our own. SOme albatrosses don't even breed until they're ten years old, and we still don't know how long they live: the birds themselves last longer than the metal rings that biologists began putting on their legs a few decades ago in order to keep track of their ages. In the ten years that it takes an albatross to start breeding, a mouse population could have gone through sixty generations, most of which would already have succumbed to predators or old age. [pg. 132]

Menopause is explained as following: it is dangerous for women to have children, and as a woman gets older she is more likely to have already had many children. Because children need their parents it becomes increasingly more expensive for a woman to die during childbirth: she would leave children motherless. As a women gets older and weaker the chance of death during birth and the cost this brings is more than the potential benefit of another child, so they lose the ability to have more children. Evolution is good, huh?

The next section of the book is all about language: how it evolved, how it is different across the cultures of the world, and what kinds of animals also possess some form of language.#

I was rather disappointed he didn't talk about alternative methods of communication other than speech; ie, the colour shifting of octopi.

I'm severely fascinated by the differences in the expressive power of different languages. One, because I think that allowing more freedom of expression is the key to unlock the beauty innate in any individual. And two, because there is a sharp difference in expressive power between different computer languages and I wonder how this parallels to natural languages. This is an interesting note about Neo-Melanesian:

Neo-Melanesian proved to be as strict as English in its grammatical rules. It is a supply language that lets one express anything sayable in English. It even lets one make some distinctions that cannot be expressed in English except by means of clumsy circumlocutions. For example, the English pronoun "we" actually lumps two quite different concepts: "I plus you to whom I am speaking," and "I plus one or more other people, but not including you to whom I am speaking." In Neo-Melanesian these two separate meanings are expressed by the words "yumi" and "mipela" respectively. After I have been using Neo-Melanesian for months and then meet an English speaker who starts talking about "we," I often find myself wondering, "Am I included or not in your 'we'?" [pg. 156-157]

Diamond also has some introductions to concepts in linguistics that I find peculiar, for example:

A blueprint [for languages] has been widely assumed ever since the linguist Noam Chomsky argued that the structure of human language is far too complex for a child to learn within just a few years, in the absence of any hard-wired instructions. [...] Difficulties [in learning languages] convinced Chomsky that children learning their first language would face an impossible task unless much of language's structure was already preprogrammed into them. Chomsky concluded that we are born with a "universal grammar" already wired into our brains to give us a spectrum of grammatical models encompassing the range of grammars in actual languages. This prewired universal grammar would be like a set of switches, each with various alternative positions. The switch positions would then become fixed to match the grammar of the local language that the growing child hears. [pg. 163]

My interpretation may be a common one, but I don't know because I haven't studied it extensively, but here goes. Speech is not something that can be detached from thought; not only is our speech constraint to what and how we can think, our thoughts are constraint by the means of which we can express them. Any suggestion of a "universal grammar" suggests to me not a way common way of speaking - but a common way of thinking. It is not hard for me to believe that our minds have intrinsic limitations in their thoughts and common idioms of thoughts that have been optimized over time. Because of language is a mapping of thoughts to speech, it seems to follow that it would inherit any innate or common attributes of thought patterns. Creativity and modes of expression other than language are then interpreted as ways of literally expanding your mind by forcing it to work in ways it is not optimized or particularly capable for. I love being an armchair intellectual.

It is fitting that I should mention art, because following language in the list of seemingly particularly human abilities is the ability and desire to produce art.#

Jared Diamond explains that the bowerbird of New Guinea is a particularly tasteful and clever artist,

If I hadn't already heard of bowers, I'd have mistaken the first one I saw for something man-made, as did nineteenth-century explorers in New Guinea. I had set out that morning from a New Guinea village, with its circular huts, neat rows of flowers, people wearing decorative beads, and little bows and arrows carried by children in imitation of their fathers' larger ones. SUddenly, in the jungle, I came across a beautifully woven circular hut eight feet in diameter and four feet high, with a doorway large enough for a child to enter and sit inside. In front of the hut was a lawn of green moss, clean of debris except for hundreds of natural objects of various colors that had obviously been placed there intentionally as decorations. They mainly consisted of flowers and fruits and leaves, but also some butterfly wings and fungi. Objects of similar color were grouped together, such as red fruits next to a group of red leaves. The largest decorations were a tall pile of black fungi facing the door, with another pile of orange fungi a few yards further from the door. All blue objects were grouped inside the hut, red ones outside, and yellow, purple, black, and a few green ones in other locations. [pg. 173]

A picture of what he's talking about.

I really like this paragraph about why it's plausible for animals to create art:

Perhaps we can now answer the question why art as we know it characterizes us but no other animal. Since chimps paint in captivity, why don't they do so in the wild? As an answer, I suggest that wild chimps still have their day filled with problems of finding food, surviving, and fending off rival chimp groups. If wild chimps had more leisure time plus the means to manufacture paints, they would be painting. The proof of my theory is that it actually happened: we're still 98 percent chimps in our genes. [pg. 179]

The next section of the book is all about agriculture and how it was not all good for humans.#

I enjoyed this paragraph about the myth of the overworked, tired, and struggling hunter-gatherer:

Another indirect test of the progressivist view is to study whether surviving twentieth-century hunter-gatherers really are worse off than farmers. Scattered throughout the world, mainly in areas unsuitable for agriculture, several dozen groups of so-called "primitive people," like the Kalahari Desert Bushmen, continued to live as hunter-gatherers in recent years. Astonishingly, it turns out that these hunters generally have leisure time, sleep a lot, and work no harder than their framing neighbors. For instance, the average time devouted each week to obtaining food has been reported to be only twelve to nineteen hours for Bushmen; how many readers of this book can boast of such a short work week? As one Bushman replied when asked why he had not emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, "Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" [pg. 184]

Another myth is that hunter-gatherers are far less healthy than their industrious brothers,

To most American and European readers, the argument that humanity could on average be better off as hunter-gatherers than we are today sounds ridiculous, because most people in industrial societies today enjoy better health than most hunter-gatherers. However, Americans and Europeans are an elite in today's world, dependent on oil and other materials imported from countries with large peasant populations and much lower health standards. If you could choose between being a middle-class American, a Bushman hunter, and a peasant farmer in Ethiopia, the first would undoubtedly be the healthiest choice, but the third might be the least healthy. [pg. 188]

A great paragraph about why it is a good thing that we have not found other intelligent life in the universe and a foreshadowing of the next great hallmark of humanity: genocide.#

I find it mind-boggling that the astronomers now eager to spend a hundred million dollars on the search for extraterrestrial life have never thought seriously about the most obvious question: what would happen if we found it, or if it found us. The astronomers tacitly assume that we and the little green monsters would welcome each other and settle down to fascinating conversations. Here again, our own experience on Earth offers useful guidance. We've already discovered two species that are very intelligent but technically less advanced than we are-the common chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee. Has our response been to sit down and try to communicate with them? Of course not. Instead we shoot them, dissect them, cut off their hands for trophies, put them on exhibit in cages, inject them with AIDS virus as a medical experiment, and destroy or take over their habitats. That response was predictable, because human explorers who discovered technically less advanced humans also regularly responded by shooting them, decimating their populations with new diseases, and destroying or taking over their habitats. [pg. 214]

In the section of the book on genocide, Jared shows how while there have been some extreme instances that have been condemned, it is something that has been essential to our growth and has been a perpetual artifact throughout our story.#

In the discussion on the genocide of American Indians, there are some surprising quotes from otherwise nobles individuals:

President George Washington: "The immediate objectives are the total destruction ad devastation of their settlements. It will be essential to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent their planting more."

President Thomas Jefferson: "This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate." [pg. 308]

The final section of the book discusses how and why current human activities will lead to our ultimate destruction and the reversal of all our "progress."#

On the lost respect for the world:

Undoubtedly, two simple reasons go a long way toward explaining our worsening mess: modern technology has far more power to cause havoc than did the stone aces of the past, and far more people are alive now than ever before. But a third factor may also have contributed: a change in attitudes. Unlike modern city dwellers, at least some preindustrial peoples-like the Duwanish, whose chief I quoted-depend on and revere their local environment. Stories abound of how such peoples are in effect practicing conservationists. As a New Guinea tribesman once explained to me, "It's our custom that if a hunter one days kills a pigeon in one direction from the village, he waits a week before hunting for pigeons again, and then goes in the opposite direction." We're only beginning to realize how sophisticated the conservationist policies of so-called primitive peoples actually are. For instance, well-intentioned foreign experts have made deserts out of large areas of Africa. In those same areas, local herders had thrived for uncounted millennia by making annual nomadic migrations, which ensured that land never became overgrazed. [pg. 318]

But that's not to say that every "Noble Savage" society preserved their environment and did no wrong. Consider Easter Island,

When Polynesians settled Easter around A.D. 400, the island was covered by forest that they gradually proceeded to clear, in order to plant gardens and to obtain logs for canoes and for erecting statues. By around 1500 the human population had built up to about 7,000 (over 150 per square mile), about 1,000 statues had been carved, and at least 324 of those status had been erected. But-the forest had been destroyed so thoroughly that not a single tree survived.

The immediate result of this self-inflicted ecological disaster was that the islanders no longer had the logs needed to transport and erect status, so carving ceased. But deforestation also had two indirect consequences that brought starvation: soil erosion, hence lower crop yields, plus lack of timber to build canoes, hence less protein available from fishing. As a result, the population was now greater than Easter could support, and island society collapsed in a holocaust of internecine warfare and cannibalism. [...] What had once been a lush island supporting one of the world's most remarkable civilizations deteriorated into the Easter Island of today: a barren grassland littered with fallen statues, and supporting less than one-third of its former population. [pg. 330-331]

We can't today's society do any better than those of the past? This paragraph illustrates the confusion over our lack of commitment to the world.

Tragic failures become moral sins only if one should have known better from the outset. In that regard there are two big differences between us and eleventh-century Anasazi Indians: scientific understanding, and literacy. We know, and they didn't know, how to draw graphs that plot sustainable resource population size as a function of resource harvesting rate. We can read about all the ecological disasters of the past; the Anasazi couldn't. Yet our generation continues to hunt whales and clear tropical rain forest as if no one had ever hunted moas or cleared pinyon-juniper woodland. The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful blindness. [pg. 337]

If this sounds interesting, I recommend picking up the book or Jared Diamond's other book that I've read: Guns, Germs, and Steel. In GGS, he elaborates more on development of human civilization and how groups of humans have interacted with each other over the years.#