The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns Germs and Steel surveys the history of human
societies to answer the question: What can we learn from traditional societies that can make
the world a better place for all of us? As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns Germs
and Steel Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new
book. Bookpage Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society from air travel
and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of
existence human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our
primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in
those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the
New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday-in evolutionary time-when
everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better
adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.The World Until Yesterday provides a
mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years-a past
that has mostly vanished-and considers what the differences between that past and our present
mean for our lives today. This is Jared Diamond's most personal book to date as he draws
extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands as well as evidence from
Inuit Amazonian Indians Kalahari San people and others. Diamond doesn't romanticize
traditional societies-after all we are shocked by some of their practices-but he finds that
their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing elder care dispute
resolution risk and physical fitness have much to teach us. Provocative enlightening and
entertaining The World Until Yesterday is an essential and fascinating read.
