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.

All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won’t create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the...

Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years?

I’ve always been interested in a lot of things, and a lot of things at the same time, and I always tried to explain them to myself. I ask a lot of questions.

I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on...

I read that a false alarm of a tsunami in Hawaii would cost about $68 million.

Eurasia’s main axis is east/west, whereas the main axis of the Americas is north/south. Eurasia’s east/west axis meant that species domesticated in one part of Eurasia could easily spread thousands of miles at the same...

To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moralistic one about who...

Starbucks goes to a great effort, and pays twice as much for its coffee as its competitors do, and is very careful to help coffee producers in developing countries grow coffee without pesticides and in...

We can’t manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can’t start and stop ice ages, and we can’t experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs.

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...

The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn...

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I’m optimistic that we can eventually arrive at...

The rate of human invention is faster, and the rate of cultural loss is slower, in areas occupied by many competing societies with many individuals and in contact with societies elsewhere.

Livestock adopted in Africa were Eurasian species that came in from the north. Africa’s long axis, like that of the Americas, is north/south rather than east/west. Those Eurasian domestic mammals spread southward very slowly in...

Humans have been evolving for millions of years longer in Africa than in Europe, and even anatomically modern Homo sapiens may have reached Europe from Africa only within the last 50,000 years. If time were...

…neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times,...

All of Africa’s mammalian domesticates – cattle, sheep, goats, horses, even dogs – entered sub-Saharan Africa from the north, from Eurasia or North Africa.

Isn’t language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world’s people? Perhaps, but it’s a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express...

I personally am not conscious of my accent.

The broadest pattern of history – namely, the differences between human societies on different continents – seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves.

With the MacArthur grant, I realized that people have high expectations of me, that they were placing me in this group of achievers. I compared what I’d actually achieved in my life with what I...

Native Americans had only stone and wooden weapons and no animals that could be ridden. Those military advantages repeatedly enabled troops of a few dozen mounted Spaniards to defeat Indian armies numbering in the thousands.

The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn’t grow – with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa.

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies’ histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we...

What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didn’t have anthropologists.

People are not helpless in the face of big business. It’s up to the public to say what it wants. Only when the public bans single-hulled oil tankers from American waters, only when the public...

Above all, it seems to me wrongheaded and dangerous to invoke historical assumptions about environmental practices of native peoples in order to justify treating them fairly. … By invoking this assumption [i.e., that they were/are...

Even to this day, no native Australian animal species and only one plant species-the macadamia nut-have proved suitable for domestication. There still are no domestic kangaroos.

Domesticated plants and animals yield far more calories per acre than do wild habitats, in which most species are inedible to humans.

Federal elections happen every two years in this country. Presidential elections every four years. And four years just isn’t long enough to dismantle all the environmental laws we’ve got in this country.

Domestic animals revolutionized land transport. They also revolutionized agriculture, by letting one farmer plough and manure much more land than the farmer could till or manure by the farmer’s own efforts.

Why were there far more species of domesticated animals in Eurasia than in the Americas? The Americas harbor over a thousand native wild mammal species, so you might initially suppose that the Americas offered plenty...