Name: The World Until Yesterday
Rating: 3.8 (56 reviews)
Author: Jared Diamond

What’s in it for me? Discover the lessons our hunter-gatherer ancestors can teach us.

Around 11,000 years ago, the human species went through a major cultural shift known as the Neolithic Revolution, when humans moved away from hunting and foraging to agriculture and farming to obtain nourishment.

This change brought about an increase in the availability of food and facilitated a population explosion, which in turn lead to urbanization, central governance and many other aspects we consider staples of modern society.

These days, whenever societal problems arise, we typically tend to look for new technologies and ideas to solve them with. But perhaps another approach is needed: perhaps we should look back to the traditional arrangements and lifestyles that worked for humanity for millennia before the advent of farming.

After all, much of our physiology and psychology evolved to suit the needs of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle: from an evolutionary perspective, the Neolithic Revolution was recent – practically yesterday.

Therefore, it stands to reason that by examining traditional societies, we may in fact be able to learn valuable lessons to help us solve the problems of modern life. The following blinks are an exploration of these lessons.

Among other things, you’ll find out

why boys as young as three months old are already given bows and arrows in some societies,
why it’s important that criminals apologize to their victims and
why religion will probably continue to play a role in society well into the future.

Small, traditional societies like hunter-gatherer bands and tribes still exist all over the world.

You might think that modern civilization has occupied all corners of the globe, but there are still several traditional societies that live much like all of humanity did some eleven thousand years ago. Though these enclaves are no doubt influenced by the modern states in which they reside, examining them allows us to get a perspective on what life was like for our ancestors.

So what kind of traditional societies can we find across the globe today?

First, there are the hunter-gatherers such as the Siriono Indians of South America and the Andaman Islanders in the Bay of Bengal.

These societies typically split up into bands of less than a hundred individuals and are very egalitarian and democratic in nature. Everyone knows one another, so they can make decisions in face-to-face discussions and no formal leadership is required.

Second, there are tribes consisting of a few hundred individuals like the Iñupiat in Alaska. These tribes can actually practice agriculture or animal herding, but it’s less intensive and sophisticated in nature than that in actual states.

Finally, there are chiefdoms, like the Chumash Indians of North America. These chiefdoms are a marked step closer to modern states and can even comprise hundreds of thousands of individuals. They have a clear, centralized leadership which collects economic goods from members and redistributes them further to warriors, priests and craftsmen who serve the chief. There is also clear social stratification: the chief’s family is at the top of society, meaning they get the best housing, food and goods.

As you can see, there is an entire continuum of societies spanning from the hunter-gatherer bands to our moderns states. We will mostly focus on the hunter-gatherers because they are the most different from our own, and hence hold the most valuable lessons for us.

Traditional societies have high mortality rates from both wars and homicide.

Archeological information and evidence of modern hunter-gatherer bands show that this form of society tended to exist in bands comprising fewer than a hundred individuals.

Why were the groups so small?

Traditional societies resolve conflicts by re-establishing relations – which modern judiciaries could learn from.

As we have seen, conflicts and disputes exist in traditional societies, but they are resolved very differently from state societies.

When disputes need to be settled in traditional societies, the emphasis is on re-establishing the previous peaceful relationship between the two parties so they can continue to live with each other in their closely knit society.

People in traditional societies raise their children very differently from those in modern ones.

In hunter-gatherer groups, mothers are incredibly responsive and accommodating. Infants are at their mother’s breast day and night, and can nurse whenever they want to, even if the mother is sleeping. Studies have also shown that when infants begin to cry, they are mostly comforted and responded to very quickly: in under ten seconds.

In modern societies, some might consider such attentive parenting detrimental, potentially stifling the child’s self-reliance. But this is disproven by the fact children in traditional societies grow up to be incredibly confident and autonomous, a fact noted by many observers.

Traditional societies tend to respect and appreciate the elderly more than modern ones.

When it comes to the treatment of the elderly, traditional societies vary greatly.

In rural Fiji, for example, people house their elderly parents and take good care of them, even pre-chewing their food for them if necessary.

Our modern lifestyle has brought us many health concerns traditional societies didn’t have.

One arena in which modern societies are arguably far better off than traditional ones is health. We’ve managed to eradicate many of the diseases and conditions that plagued humanity in the traditional world: diarrhea, malnutrition, parasites, etc. Indeed, life expectancies in modern societies can be twice as long as they were in traditional ones.

However, we in the modern world are plagued by other major causes of death which weren’t present in simpler times: non-communicable diseases (or NCDs). These are things like cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, kidney conditions and lung cancer. In fact, almost 90 percent of all Americans, Europeans and Japanese reading this will die of these NCDs.

From traditional societies to modern ones, religion has played an ever-present, yet evolving role.

One interesting aspect of humanity is that religion always has a part to play, whether we look at traditional hunter-gatherer groups or modern states, and its role evolves as society does.

Probably, religion first came about due to the natural human inclination to look for intentional causes for events that we see. For example, traditional societies tend to believe that things like rivers and the sun are propelled by supernatural forces.

Final Summary

The key message in this book:

Until practically yesterday, all of humanity had lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers. Even today, such traditional societies have a lot to teach us: from the way they raise their children to how they settle their disputes.

The World Until Yesterday summary