YALI'SQUESTION • 25
molded society, occupying lands conquered from Native Americans and incorporating the descendants of millions of sub-Saharan black Africans brought to America as slaves. Modern Europe is not a society molded by sub-Saharan black Africans who brought millions of Native Americans as slaves.
These results are completely lopsided: it was not the case that 51 percent of the Americas, Australia, and Africa was conquered by Europeans, while 49 percent of Europe was conquered by Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, or Africans. The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes. Hence they must have inexorable explanations, ones more basic than mere details concerning who happened to win some battle or develop some invention on one occasion a few thousand years ago.
It seems logical to suppose that history's pattern reflects innate differences among people themselves. Of course, we're taught that it's not polite to say so in public. We read of technical studies claiming to demonstrate inborn differences, and we also read rebuttals claiming that those studies suffer from technical flaws. We see in our daily lives that some of the conquered peoples continue to form an underclass, centuries after the conquests or slave imports took place. We're told that this too is to be attributed not to any biological shortcomings but to social disadvantages and limited opportunities.
Nevertheless, we have to wonder. We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in peoples' status. We're assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation for the world's inequalities as of a.d. 1500 is wrong, but we're not told what the correct explanation is. Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book.
authors are regularly asked by journalists to summarize a long book in one sentence. For this book, here is such a sentence: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves."
Naturally, the notion that environmental geography and biogeography influenced societal development is an old idea. Nowadays, though, the
26 •PROLOGUE
view is not held in esteem by historians; it is considered wrong or simplistic, or it is caricatured as environmental determinism and dismissed (ha as did Cambridge Prof of history Martin Daunton!), or else the whole subject of trying to understand worldwide differences is shelved as too difficult. Yet geography obviously has some effect on history; the open question concerns how much effect, and whether geography can account for history's broad pattern.
The time is now ripe for a fresh look at these questions, because of new information from scientific disciplines seemingly remote from human history. Those disciplines include, above all, genetics, molecular biology, and biogeography as applied to crops and their wild ancestors; the same disciplines plus behavioral ecology, as applied to domestic animals and their wild ancestors; molecular biology of human germs and related germs of animals; epidemiology of human diseases; human genetics; linguistics; archaeological studies on all continents and major islands; and studies of the histories of technology, writing, and political organization.
This diversity of disciplines poses problems for would-be authors of a book aimed at answering Yali's question. The author must possess a range of expertise spanning the above disciplines, so that relevant advances can be synthesized. The history and prehistory of each continent must be similarly synthesized. The book's subject matter is history, but the approach is that of science—in particular, that of historical sciences such as evolutionary biology and geology. The author must understand from firsthand experience a range of human societies, from hunter-gatherer societies to modern space-age civilizations.
These requirements seem at first to demand a multi-author work. Yet that approach would be doomed from the outset, because the essence of the problem is to develop a unified synthesis. That consideration dictates single authorship, despite all the difficulties that it poses. Inevitably, that single author will have to sweat copiously in order to assimilate material from many disciplines, and will require guidance from many colleagues.
My background had led me to several of these disciplines even before Yali put his question to me in 1972. My mother is a teacher and linguist; my father, a physician specializing in the genetics of childhood diseases. Because of my father's example, I went through school expecting to become a physician. I had also become a fanatical bird-watcher by the age of seven. It was thus an easy step, in my last undergraduate year at university, to shift from my initial goal of medicine to the goal of biological
YALI'SQUESTION • 27
research. However, throughout my school and undergraduate years, my training was mainly in languages, history, and writing. Even after deciding to obtain a Ph.D. in physiology, I nearly dropped out of science during my first year of graduate school to become a linguist.
Since completing my Ph.D. in 1961, I have divided my scientific research efforts between two fields: molecular physiology on the one hand, evolutionary biology and biogeography on the other hand. As an unforeseen bonus for the purposes of this book, evolutionary biology is a historical science forced to use methods different from those of the laboratory sciences. That experience has made the difficulties in devising a scientific approach to human history familiar to me. Living in Europe from 1958 to 1962, among European friends whose lives had been brutally traumatized by 20th-century European history, made me start to think more seriously about how chains of causes operate in history's unfolding.
For the last 33 years my fieldwork as an evolutionary biologist has brought me into close contact with a wide range of human societies. My specialty is bird evolution, which I have studied in South America, southern Africa, Indonesia, Australia, and especially New Guinea. Through living with native peoples of these areas, I have become familiar with many technologically primitive human societies, from those of hunter-gatherers to those of tribal farmers and fishing peoples who depended until recently on stone tools. Thus, what most literate people would consider strange lifestyles of remote prehistory are for me the most vivid part of my life. New Guinea, though it accounts for only a small fraction of the world's land area, encompasses a disproportionate fraction of its human diversity. Of the modern world's 6,000 languages, 1,000 are confined to New Guinea. In the course of my work on New Guinea birds, my interests in language were rekindled, by the need to elicit lists of local names of bird species in nearly 100 of those New Guinea languages.
Out of all those interests grew my most recent book, a nontechnical account of human evolution entitled The Third Chimpanzee. Its Chapter 14, called "Accidental Conquerors," sought to understand the outcome of the encounter between Europeans and Native Americans. After I had completed that book, I realized that other modern, as well as prehistoric, encounters between peoples raised similar questions. I saw that the question with which I had wrestled in that Chapter 14 was in essence the question Yali had asked me in 1972, merely transferred to a different part of