The World Until Yesterday

What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

Recommended by Bill Gates, and 1 others. See all reviews

Ranked #20 in Anthropology

The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel surveys the history of human societies to answer the question: What can we learn from traditional societies that can make the world a better place for all of us?

Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former...

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Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of The World Until Yesterday from the world's leading experts.

Bill Gates CEO/MicrosoftIt’s not as good as Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. But then, few books are. Diamond finds fascinating anecdotes about what life is like for hunter-gatherers and asks which ones might apply to our modern lifestyles. He doesn’t make some grand pronouncement or romanticize tribal life. He just wants to find the best practices and share them. (Source)


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