The World Until Yesterday

My top 30 points:

Overview

1. The shift from hunting-gathering to farming began 11,000 years ago; the first metal tools were produced only about 7,000 years ago; and the first state government and the first writing arose only around 5,400 years ago. “Modern” conditions have prevailed for only a tiny fraction of human history.

2. Responsibility in the U.S. has been taken from the person acting and has been placed on the owner of the land or the builder of the house. Most Americans want to blame someone other than themselves as much as possible.

3. Most of our understanding of human psychology is based on subjects who may be described by the acronym WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. Hence if we wish to generalize about human nature, we need to broaden greatly our study sample from the usual WEIRD subjects (mainly American psychology undergraduates) to the whole range of traditional societies.

4. We may have much to learn from people in other societies about diverse (and sometimes markedly better) options than we find in modern Western societies for addressing property ownership; engaging in war and establishing peace; bringing up children; treating old people; responding to dangers; understanding religion; appreciating the diversity of languages; diets and chronic illnesses; and more.

Conflict resolution

5. Western adjudication is a search for what happened and who did it; Navajo peace-making is about the effect of what happened. Who got hurt? What do they feel about it? What can be done to repair the harm?

6. A defect of civil justice in the U.S. is that it fails to require the losing party to pay the lawyers’ fees of the successful party. That favors the wealthier party and places pressure on a less wealthy plaintiff to settle for less, and on a less wealthy defendant to settle by paying a frivolous claim.

7. That’s because wealthy parties threaten expensive litigation, adopt delaying tactics, and file endless discovery motions in order to wear down the other party financially.

Warfare

8. Escalation of spontaneous individual fighting into organized warfare of armies is rare in centralized state societies but does sometimes happen.

9. New Guineans appreciated the benefits of the state-guaranteed peace that they had been unable to achieve for themselves without state government.

Family Life and Childbirth

10. In contrast to modern baby carriers and pouches, traditional carrying devices, such as slings or holding a child on one’s shoulders, usually place the child vertically upright, facing forwards, and seeing the same world that the care-giver sees.

11. Western children sleeping in separate rooms, transported in baby carriages, and left in cribs during the day are often socially more isolated than are cradle-boarded Navajo children.

12. In some traditional societies, children may be left in the care of their grandparents for days or weeks at a time. Hadza children who have an involved grandmother gain weight faster than do children without involved grandmothers. Aunts and uncles also serve as important allo-parents in many traditional societies.

13. Anthropologists working with small-scale societies have seen the precocious development of social skills among children in those societies. The richness of allo-parental relationships may provide part of the explanation.

14. There is no division between play and learning. The kids play for fun, but their play is practice for adult stuff. Eg among the Dani people the play of children imitates everything that goes on in the world of adults including fighting battles with grass spears; using spears or sticks to “kill” “armies” of berries, hunting birds for fun, building imitation huts.

15. A regular feature of the games of hunter-gatherer societies and the smallest farming societies is their lack of competition or contests unlike many American games which are about winning and losing. Instead, their games often involve sharing, to prepare children for adult life that emphasizes sharing and discourages contests.

16. Hunter-gatherers are “fiercely egalitarian, and that they don’t tell anyone, not even a child, to do anything”. So children enjoy much more autonomy.

17. In a small community (30 is the average), there can be no segregation of children according to age and sex so all play together. This also means that children grow up looking after younger children and are thus well prepared for parenthood however early it comes.

Old Age

18. Worst of all in modern society is our treatment of the elderly. In rural Fiji old people continue to live in the village where they have spent their lives, surrounded by their relatives and life-long friends. They often reside in a house of their children, who take care of them.

19. Mandatory retirement ages were until recently widespread in the United States, and they are still widespread in Europe. Employers tend to consider older people as set in their ways and less manageable and teachable.

Risk

20. Talking is the main form of entertainment in New Guinea. This helps to maintain and develop social relationships and also helps New Guineans to cope with life in the dangerous world around them. We get most of our information about the world around us from the media; traditional New Guineans get all their information from their own observations and from each other.

21. A common Western reaction to danger (that is never encountered among experienced New Guineans) is to be macho, to seek or enjoy dangerous situations, or to pretend to be unafraid and try to hide one’s own fear. Actively avoiding hazardous situations is considered prudent, not cowardly or unmasculine.

Religion

22. Small-scale societies place much less emphasis on world rejection, salvation, and the afterlife than do large-scale, more complex and recent societies.

23. Life became harder as hunter-gatherers became farmers and assembled in larger societies. Work hours increased, nutrition deteriorated, infectious disease and body wear increased, and lifespan shortened. Conditions deteriorated even further for urban proletariats during the Industrial Revolution, as work days lengthened, and as hygiene, health, and pleasures diminished.

24. The comforting function of religion has increased in more populous and recent societies: it’s simply that those societies inflict on us more bad things for which we crave comfort. This comforting role of religion helps why misfortune tends to make people more religious, and why poorer social strata, regions, and countries tend to be more religious than richer ones.

Language

25. It’s important to speak the language of at least some community. If you instead speak a mish-mash near a speech boundary, both groups may understand much of what you say, but neither group will consider you “one of our own,” and you can’t count on either group to welcome and protect you. That may be why we have thousands of languages instead of the whole world speaking one language.

26. Among 20 New Guineans, the smallest number of languages that anyone spoke was 5. Several men spoke from 8 to 12 languages, and the champion was a man who spoke 15.

27. Intriguing results of the last few years suggest a protective effect of life-long bilingualism against Alzheimer’s symptoms.

Diseases

28. It’s clear that salt intake does influence blood pressure, at least at the opposite extremes of very low and very high salt intake. The population with the world’s lowest recorded salt intake, Brazil’s Yanomamo Indians, also had the world’s lowest average blood pressure, an astonishingly low 96 over 61.

29. Diabetes is the leading cause of adult blindness in the US; the second leading cause of non-traumatic foot amputations; the cause of one-third of our cases of kidney failure; a major risk factor for stroke, heart attacks, peripheral vascular disease, and nerve degeneration.

30. The starve-and-gorge lifestyle traditionally shared by all human populations resulted in natural selection of genes for a thrifty genotype that served us well under those starve-and-gorge conditions, but that has then caused virtually all populations to end up with a propensity for diabetes under modern Western conditions of unremitting food abundance.