No beating about the bush

America's best-known geographer shows what there is to learn from early man

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

1 JARED DIAMOND has made a name for himself explaining why some societies do well and others do not. In “Guns, Germs and Steel”, his 1997 bestseller, he brushed aside the arrogant view that ascribed Europe's dominance to human biology, stressing instead the continent's environmental advantages, notably its native wheat and barley and its easily domesticated animals. He followed this up eight years later with “Collapse”, another exhaustive study, this time about how certain societies caused their own demise by ruining the environs that sustained them. Read together, these are civilisation-scale books about survival.

Mr Diamond writes, for example, that most societies have held on to some form of religion as a way of maintaining social order, comforting the anxious and teaching political obedience. Tribal societies in New Guinea rarely, if ever, fight over religious matters. These societies also tend to be more multilingual, helpful for diplomacy perhaps, and as it turns out, also a way of protecting against Alzheimer's. There are 1,000 different languages in New Guinea alone. Traditional societies resolve disputes by making do entirely without the state. In stark contrast to the American criminal-justice system, the leopard-skin-draped chief of Sudan's Nuer people has no role in settling disputes but works to facilitate mediation and calculate traditional forms of compensation.

Other things have changed, not all of them for the better. The gluttonous industrialised world could benefit from a more Palaeolithic diet. Traditional societies have hardly a trace of the West's main non-communicable diseases, such as heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and many forms of cancer—the hallmarks of a diet rich in salt and saturated fat.Thanks to a cuisine of mainly low-sodium bananas, Brazil's Yanomamo Indians consume only 50 milligrams of salt a day. One Big Mac would give them a month's worth. Tribespeople who adopt a sedentary lifestyle and eat processed food show a sharp increase in the same diseases that afflict Westerners. A third of urbanised Australian aboriginals suffer from type-2 diabetes, and among the Wanigela in Port Moresby, New Guinea's modern capital city, the figure is closer to 40%.

Mr Diamond is at his most impressed when it comes to tribal family life. He writes of missionary children who prefer the playgroups of traditional societies that bring together children of different ages to the solitary fixation on video games that are common back home. Raising children is a communal affair in which the elderly are deeply involved, unlike what happens in most Western countries. He cites studies that show that an African Aka pygmy infant, for example, is looked after by at least seven people and babies in the Efe tribe by as many as 14.At the same time, he writes, children in traditional households seem to enjoy more autonomy. In the Kalahari the !Kung do not resort to physical punishment; instead children are allowed to slap and insult their parents. And New Guinea Highlander children are encouraged to play with knives and with fire, precisely so that they are able to learn from their mistakes.

In all this, the author's argument is not that we should abandon our modern way of life—he certainly has not—nor does he romanticise traditional people as earth-loving peaceniks. A tribal life can, after all, be nasty and brutish. Few people live past the age of 50, mostly because of curable diseases. For the !Kung, infanticide has been permitted in order to preserve resources in lean times. Bolivia's Siriono Indians abandoned their elderly once they became a burden. North American Crow Indians encouraged them to commit suicide. Tribal warfare may kill far fewer than 21st-century mechanised versions, but there is still a constant fear of raids and revenge killings. And a higher percentage of the population dies fighting.

Nor is subsistence living for the faint- hearted. Shortages can mean starvation. Taro, a tropical-root vegetable, is the staple food of the Kaulong people of New Britain, an island off Papua New Guinea. But in the dry season they are forced to scour the forest for insects, snails and unpalatable plants. Toxic wild nuts must be soaked in water for days to leach out the poison.

Mr Diamond's book is mostly a fascinating survey of a rapidly fading world. Only when it tries to pose as a handbook for tribal living does it fall flat. Comparing traditional strategies for maximising crop yields with modern ways of managing financial investments is more banal than original. Our forebears have been around for a lot longer than we have; learning how they did so should be lesson enough.