Diamond Says Sleep With Your Kids, Spare Parents: Books Human
beings and apes went their separate ways 6 million years ago,
Jared Diamond notes near the beginning of “The World Until
Yesterday.” Yet agriculture has been around for just 11,000
years, and the first state government arose only 5,400 years
ago. In other words, life as we know it accounts for a small
fraction of human history. By looking closely at the world’s
last few “traditional” (i.e., tribal) societies -- especially in
New Guinea, where he’s spent much of the past half-century --
Diamond shows what it must have been like before that. He deftly
explodes a few myths, beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
“speculative and ungrounded theory” that “humans were naturally
compassionate in a state of nature, and that wars began only
with the rise of states.” The reality was the opposite --
maniacal xenophobia and perennial war. If you encountered a
stranger on your path, you had essentially two options: run or
fight. The percentage of people that tr