The World Until Yesterday

What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

By: Jared Diamond

Narrated by: Jay Snyder

Length: 18 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

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. A characteristically provocative, enlightening, and entertaining book, The World Until Yesterday will be essential and delightful listening.

©2012 Jared Diamond (P)2012 Penguin Audio

Broadening of the mind

Opened up a whole new world to me. Provides an alternative perspective on us, and gives a balanced insight into the richness of the world before civilization.

Should be required school reading

This is a fascinating look at the history of human civilization. Non-fiction that reads like a novel. Highly recommended.

Shockingly insightful!

I was asking myself questions which Jared Diamond unfailingly answered 2 sentences later.
This book should have a life changing impact on most people!

Worth reading

Fascinating comparison of modern life vs traditional tribal lifestyles. Provides much food for thought with regard to the elements of traditional tribal lifestyles that can be incorporated into modern western society.

Good perspective and exciting anecdotes

Much of the book sticks to the theme in the title, describing how humans live in hunter gatherer societies. Diamond lived and studied birds in Papua New Guinea, so he has good perspective and exciting anecdotes to share.

There are a couple digressions of varying quality. The weakest such chapter is on the evolution of religion. Diamond seems to have no clue how natural selection actually works. He thinks religion has to serve some purpose to the person or group. But those aren't the relevant replicators on which selection acts! Religions are built of memes. The fitness of the a tells us nothing about its benefit to the person or group. We can conclude that the benefit of having memes, per se, is worth their cumulative parasitic costs. And in humans, this hardly needs explaining.

More JD

Stimulating dialogue which illuminates several sociological issues which we and our leaders much address soon

A visit with our ancient ancestors

Jared Diamond is patient with the non-academic reader. He presents his intriguing ideas in story form with a minimum of statistics and dry facts. He shares his insights from a long career of living among primitive people in several areas -- mostly Papua New Guinea. He tells about the similarities and differences of their lives compared to ours. Then he asks, "Could they have been onto something that we could revisit in our own lives?" It is a good question and one that stays with the reader long after the book is finished.

One example: in primitive groups, children spend a lot of time in age-mixed groups which allows the younger kids to learn from the older ones and the older ones to feel pride and accomplishment when they teach the younger ones. In our culture, children are separated into age-specific groups and taught together by an adult. The age segregation continues outside school in team sports and play dates. With small families, some children do not have experience with children of other ages -- often until they become parents themselves. As I was reading this, my 10-year-old grandson was playing with his 1-year-old cousin, showing her new ways to play with her "baby" toys. She was delighted with his attention and soon turned her push-car upside down as he had done, spinning the wheels with her hands. Later, the 10-year-old went to a museum with his 20-year-old cousin to see dinosaurs. The 20-year-old grew up in this town and had visited the museum many times, so he was an expert in the eyes of the 10-year-old and he seemed to enjoy the adulation.

This book made me think about the "advances" we have made in our culture and question it. Most of it has been good (sanitation, public health, medical care) but some of the old ways have merit and deserve examination. After all, they were in practice until "just yesterday" and helped us survive and evolve to what we are today.

Grazing at the jungle buffet

I was really pleased when I discovered that another Jared Diamond book was available in audio. ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ and ‘Collapse’ made a big impact on my world view, and so I was excited to realise I had a whole new JD book to listen to. It was written in 2012, so I probably should have been aware of its existence earlier, I just didn’t think to look.

Anyway, this book is an interesting and worthwhile listen, but it doesn’t pack the punch carried by the two prior books. Diamond looks at a range of traditional small scale societies, some of the few remaining people on earth who still live pretty much as our pre-civilisation ancestors would have done. He acknowledges that these hunter-gatherer and subsistence farmer societies are not absolutely pristine and unaffected by the modern world – it is impossible to escape some small degree of ‘contamination’ by modernity - but their cultures and lifestyles are still predominantly traditional.

He examines the various cultures from the perspective of how these societies cope with a number of different universal human problems; resolving disputes; raising children; treatment of elders; dealing with danger, etc, and the point of the book is to discuss whether we moderns could learn from these traditionals.

And of course in some ways we can. There are numerous examples where the book helps you to recognise that we could adopt a different approach (e.g. in justice, where traditional societies sometimes successfully use mediation and compensation instead of punitive measures) – but there are also cases where these societies have got it badly wrong due to the lack of scientific knowledge (e.g. infectious diseases caused by poor sanitation).

From a pragmatic point of view, the difficult part is, firstly, to decide what traditional practices are worth incorporating into our modern cultures, and then secondly, even trickier, deciding how to go about this. Unlike the two earlier works, both of which had one central idea brilliantly demonstrated through the book, this book is a buffet of offerings. You hover at the table and think ‘hmmm, that looks OK, I wonder if I should have some…or shall I have a bit of this instead.’

The chapter on religion gives some illuminating ideas about how religion came to be a feature of all societies, and the section on the deleterious effects of Western diets is very interesting, if not particularly groundbreaking. There’s also a slightly bizarre chapter about the value of multilingualism, which is apparently very good for your brain.

So – the book is very enjoyable and carries a lot of valuable insights, but it has a lot to live up to compared to his earlier works, and although I recommend it unreservedly, I think I will probably have forgotten about it in a few audiobooks’ time.

Changes your entire view about societies

What did you love best about The World until Yesterday?

I loved the way it challenges each and every one of your notions about how a society "should" be. That's the best part. How Diamond stops you of taking anything for granted and shows the wide variety of lifestyles people have made over centuries. It's a really refreshing view, and it tickles my inner ideas that there is no one "correct" way to live your life.

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

Storywise, the book is a bit scattered. It works more like a list of different aspects of society like child rearing, justice, food supplies and so on and then explains all the different ways small-scale societies have dealt with them in sharp contrast to how modern western societies have dealt with them. It took me a while to finish the book given how I could basically pick any point in it and start reading, so continuity is not a big deal within it. Nonetheless, the content of each chapter is really good.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

It made me awe most of all when I heard about some custom or specific view by a small society about an aspect of life that I had never thought about. The emotions that goes through you are mostly fascination, curiosity and interest. Specially for a city-rat as myself who knows little of the way humans have figured out how to make a living.
One important adverse reaction is flinching when Diamond describes some of the ugliest and most horrifying practices by some societies, which not only destroy any possible romanticism you may have for low-technology living, but also makes you feel grateful people have a bigger chance to choose how to live now than in the present.

Any additional comments?

The narrator is great. He's completely fearless in his reading, which is surprising considering how many topics in the book are hard to listen to given their shock and cruelty in some cases, so I can only imagine what it was for him to read them out loud. Kudos for his bravery in pronunciation of New Guinea words and places.

Best since Guns, Germs, and Steel

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

This book is the culmination of Diamond's extensive experiences with traditional cultures. Anyone that is interested in cultures and how they form will find this book to indispensable.

What did you like best about this story?

The anecdotes that Diamond provides based on his firsthand experiences are excellent.

What does Jay Snyder bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Nicely narrated.