NEW YORK TIMES Book Review: ..Nation states occasionally engage in vast, hellacious wars, but these are rare. Most people in nation states feel qualms about killing another human being and have been taught to restrain their lust for revenge. People in many tribal societies, Diamond writes, do not share these attitudes. Without central governments, they have trouble bringing wars to an end. They live in peril. The highest war-related death rates for modern societies (Russia and Germany during the 20th century) are only a third of the average death rates of tribal societies. Modern societies average war-related death rates that are about one-tenth as high as tribal societies…
We sit around subway cars lost in our thoughts and smartphones. But people in traditional societies converse constantly, learning from one another and sharing. Diamond writes that it was sometimes hard for him to sleep during his research trips because the New Guineans he was staying with would awake in the middle of the night and resume the conversation they had left off a few hours before…
Modern mothers tend to breast-feed children on a schedule. But mothers in traditional societies nurse on demand and spend almost all their time having skin-to-skin contact with their babies, often carrying them in a sling, with the child placed vertically and facing forward, which Diamond suggests might be why babies from certain tribal societies develop neuromotor skills faster than American infants… (more)
