I missed Jared Diamond’s essay “Tales From the World Before Yesterday” when it was published at Edge on the last day of 2012. A passage about what he learned from his travels to New Guinea, where he encountered humanity as it was until very recently:

“I first went to New Guinea 41 years ago to study birds and to have adventures. I knew intellectually that New Guineans constituted most of the world’s last remaining ‘primitive peoples,’ who until a few decades ago still used stone tools, little clothing, and no writing. That was what the whole world used to be like until 7,000 years ago, a mere blink of an eye in the history of the human species. Only in a couple of other parts of the world besides New Guinea did our original long-prevailing ‘primitive’ ways survive into the 20th century.

Stone tools, little clothing, and no writing proved to be only the least of the differences between our past and our present. There were other differences that I noticed within my first year in New Guinea: murderous hostility towards any stranger, marriageable young people having no role in choosing their spouse, lack of awareness of the existence of an outside world, and routine multi-lingualism from childhood.

But there were also more profound features, which took me a long time even to notice, because they are so at odds with modem experience that neither New Guineans nor I could even articulate them. Each of us took some aspects of our lifestyle for granted and couldn’t conceive of an alternative. Those other New Guinea features included the non-existence of ‘friendship’ (associating with someone just because you like them), a much greater awareness of rare hazards, war as an omnipresent reality, morality in a world without judicial recourse, and a vital role of very old people.”