While traditional historians concentrate on treaties and successions, Diamond has concerned himself with the ecological constraints that influence the fate of a particular nation or state.Ĭonsider Diamond's astonishingly successful Guns, Germs and Steel, which has sold more than 1.5m copies since its publication in 1998. The World Until Yesterday is Diamond's latest foray into a field that he has virtually made his own – the biological analysis of human history – and will be eagerly awaited by a global army of loyal readers. His book, subtitled 'What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?', is a form of rescue anthropology, he explains, a bid to save the last useful nuggets of tribal life before it is finally destroyed by the spread of nations and states. With his moustache-less beard, he looks more like a renegade Amish preacher than a distinguished biologist. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.'ĭiamond is wearing a bright red jacket, checked trousers, a carefully ironed shirt and a tie. 'But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. 'We have virtually abandoned living in traditional societies,' explains Diamond when we meet. Other habits have included infanticide and outbreaks of war between neighbours, though these are balanced with many cases of care and compassion, particularly for the elderly, and a concern for the environment that shames the west. It is a grotesque notion but certainly not the only fantastic idea to have gripped traditional societies, says Diamond. Widow-strangling occurred because the Kaulong believed male spirits needed the company of females to survive the after-life.

The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond