It’s striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.

Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans...

The Norse held values that would not allow them to deal with… pagans and certainly would not let them eat fish and hunt ringed seals the way these pagans did. So here is a case...

The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island, isolated in the Pacific Ocean ”’ once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they...

In modern times, Australia was the sole continent still inhabited only by hunter-gatherers… Native Australia had no farmers or herders, no writing, no metal tools, and no political organization beyond the level of the tribe...

[T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.

For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as ‘environmental determinism,’ the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies’ responses also...

for men and 5′ for women.

Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it’s the world’s largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with.

In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That’s increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much...

Until the end of the last Ice Age around 11,000 B.C., all humans on all continents were still living as Stone Age hunter/gatherers.

Population densities of farmers and herders are typically 10 to 100 times greater than those of hunter/gatherers. That fact alone explains why farmers and herders everywhere in the world have been able to push hunter/gatherers...

[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or...

Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction – namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years.

Most people are explicitly racists. In parts of the world – so called educated, so-called western society – we’ve learned that it is not polite to be racist, and so often we don’t express racist...

Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.

[In the last several months I have been reading] Collapse … Guns, Germs and Steel.

We’re uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It’s classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

Easter Island collapsed in not just an epidemic of civil war but cannibalism. Of all the collapses of the past, I find the one that grabs people the most is that of Easter Island.

One could say that Patagonia is radically environmentalist, a company that’s founded on those principles. But there are other examples, too. I spoke at a World Wildlife Fund dinner fundraiser last October hosted and funded...

Tasmania lies 130 miles southeast of Australia. When it was first visited by Europeans in 1642, Tasmania was occupied by 4,000 hunter-gatherers related to mainland Australians, but with the simplest technology of any recent people...

Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

Technology has to be invented or adopted.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined … Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and...

Australia is the most isolated continent.

Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation.

Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique.

Science is often misrepresented as Ӧthe body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory. Ӧ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

The Indian civilizations of Central and North America remained entirely without pack animals; and it took thousands of years for the corn that evolved in Mexico’s climate to become modified into a corn adapted to...

Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.

The problem is that only a tiny minority of wild plants and animals lend themselves to domestication, and those few are concentrated in about half a dozen parts of the world.

Guns, Germs and Steel

Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did...

Tasmanians actually abandoned some technologies that they brought with them from Australia and that persisted on the Australian mainland. For example, bone tools and the practice of fishing were both present in Tasmania at the...

No government is here forever. And there are other forces – the most potent force in our society, in fact, big business – doing good for the environment.

Some people have much more pull than other people. But when I say that the public has ultimate responsibility, I’m not saying it in a moral sense. I’m just saying it in the sense of...

AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion… It’s, what, a few months in Iraq.

Science is often misrepresented as the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory. Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively...

Take air quality in the United States today: It’s about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, even though there are now more people driving more cars.

I’d rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun.

Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as...

If one of those friendly societies itself runs into environmental problems and collapses for environmental reasons, that collapse may then drag down their trade partners.

People are responding so well to the book – it’s really an upper.

Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks… of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economic interdependence.

African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on horses. But it couldn’t happen.

Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north.

(On the beginning of the mid-1990s’ genocidal war in Rwanda:)Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda’s total population, had been killed.

If you gave me 10 million dollars, I wouldn’t live any differently. Although nowadays I guess you’d have to raise that to 20 million to mean anything.