[E4] Jared Diamond — Anthropologist

relatively recently when we were Homo sapiens not Neanderthals or something like a hundred thousand years ago that's when we started to exploit resources hello I'm Greg stone and for this week I've got my very good friend dr. Jared Diamond's gerrae I'm so happy to be here thank you for having me into your home and letting me invade with this film crew that nobody could see but you and I you and I have a connection a number of levels in life one of which is we're both from Boston we were born there but now we're here the timing is perfect because last night my son who's living in Boston and has a girlfriend who's not from Boston asked me to have a phone conversation with him and his girlfriend demonstrating Boston accent and so we rehearsed park your car in the Harvard Yard park your car at method well and that's really kind of a neat thing here we are to Boston boys no we're out here on the west coast we both live in LA we both study the world around us you through anthropology and birds and of course me through the ocean but what's brought us here is is the ocean today and I would wonder if you could just tell me a little bit about your connection to the ocean and when you first became aware of it rowing up in Boston the origin story that's easy to remember Greg because growing up in Boston my father would take us in the summer on vacations and our vacations were almost always on the coast first vacation that I can recall was an Taunton followed by two years in Woods Hole which meant that I would go along the beach and gather shells and see fish then we had several years of Bar Harbor and I'm dessert are on the hosts of Maine where I would go out actually fishing one of the most exciting moments there was catching a softshell lobster on a fishing line with hook we also saw gigantic jelly fishes at least they seemed to me gigantic at the time oh and then on the beach in Nantasket in retrospect the ocean was so cold and that nowadays I wouldn't go into it without a wetsuit because I need a wetsuit even to go into the often New Guinea but in those days I was used to it and then subsequently once I started working in New Guinea in the Solomons I had a number of trips first in the CIC islands of off Eastern New Guinea running back and forth on boats in the Solomon Islands then running back and forth between islands and then finally in 1986 a whole project in the Rodger Arpad Island so I can't help but mention you you mentioned Nantasket which is a beach just south of Boston and I can't believe you mentioned that that that's actually where I first saw the ocean and I remember to this day I was about seven or eight years old because we didn't actually live in Boston we lived out in Walpole it took a while to get there and it wasn't a routine thing but my parents took me to the ocean when I was about seven years old my cousin lived in Hingham right next to Nantasket Beach and that's the first place I ever saw the ocean my cousin had two flippers and two masks so we each got one flipper and we each had a mask and we went out and that's where I fell in love with the ocean talking about origins you know I'd like to think back in time I always like to do these like thought experiments you know what was it like for humans back in Africa let's say before we made the great Exodus once we became modern some several hundred thousand years ago and our world was as far as we could see see to get up on top of the hill and that's really what what you could see today we have Google Earth looking down we really have a much better sense of what's around us and you've talked to me often about how we were constrained by land terrestrial animals but then we began to venture out into the ocean and you've you've said some interesting things about visibility and and they've the effect that visibility of Islands might have had on these early human tribes can you tell me more about that because actually I don't fully understand it sure perhaps to begin with a with a modern example this is a beautiful short story by the French writer need to Maupassant wrote short stories and one of his really touching short stories is entitled happiness the first two paragraphs begin with someone asking is it possible for a couple to remain happy forever and the teller of the story says yes and here's an example there on the coast of the Mediterranean he looks out on the distance and err an enormous mass rising from the mist and the personal ago says that's Corsica you can see it only two or three times a year but it's emerging from the the clouds now we can see course a good dozens of miles off and Corsica reminds me that in Corsica I met a couple in a remote area she had given up her life to be with him but this illustrates that yes you could be happy for a long time but it all starts with a view of Corsica when I think of traditional people so they were on the coast why on earth would they do something as dangerous as getting into a boat or on a log or on a raft certainly initially they would do it only if they could see land out there to go out without land being visible is is literally suicidal and that means that the parts of the world where people would be motivated to use boats would be the possible world where their islands to see there are really only two parts of the world where there are lots of islands that you can see from the mainland one is the Mediterranean with Corsica Sicily Crete and Cyprus and the other is Southeast Asia in the New Guinea region which are just dotted with islands as you go from the Malay Peninsula out to the Solomon Islands past Indonesia New Guinea always an island is visible from the previous island until you reach the end of the Solomons which is the end of visibility and not surprising I think the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia New Guinea those are the two parts of the world where they were great traditional navigators Europeans and then ultimately the Polynesians we were as Africans themselves apparently never reached Madagascar because it was invisible Native Americans were not ocean-going and Australians were not ocean-going I think this is the effect of Island visibility on behavior but if then raises the question why would anybody set out to see like the Polynesians with his nothing visible and everybody talks about Polynesians but there were others than besides Polynesians right who were the first ones tell me about that story of going out and coming back and sure before they were Holland's I'm Gregg there are two or three cases of people colonizing islands that were invisible but in two of those cases there were never less warning signs one was the colonisation of Australia from Tim or Tim Morris 200 miles from Australia there is no way that you're going to see Australia from Tim or people got out to Timor by stepping stones from the nail a peninsula you can see each Island from the previous aisle until you get out to Timor and then a team or there's a 200-mile gap how did people ever colonize Australia 50,000 years ago across that gap but one possibility because Australia was dry particularly the northwest coast they were brushfires and their enormous brush fires and the brush fires led off smoke so it's possible that the clue to people on Tim or that there was something else was the brush first smoke signal the first smoke signal then as people spread out to New Guinea and then spread from New Guinea to the Bismarck's to the Solomons between the Bismarck's and the Solomons there's a gap of maybe 100 miles or so where there may not have been visibility but on the other side of that gap was a Bougainville and Bougainville has Mount Baldy and now thou be blows off so a warning sign for the people on new Ireland would be the volcanic dust the intermittent explosions that's the second sign so there's intermittent signs but then comes the case the Polynesians going out across gaps with is absolutely no possibility of fire storms or of volcanic explosions that's when the ancestors of Polynesians are so called the pita people went from the Solomon 700 miles out to Fiji across 700 miles you don't see fires you don't see volcanoes what would have induced them to do this apparently suicidal thing yeah well these people were hunters as well as farmers and hunters would have noticed the huge swarms of millions of seabirds shearwaters coming in once a year and then going in the other direction once and because they were good naturalist they would have figured out that where they were shearwaters coming in and huge numbers every year there must have been land out there and land that supported these millions of shearwaters so a speculation is that what induced people to head out into nothing from the southeastern Solomons was the sheer waters so they were following the patterns of natural wild animals and putting together their knowledge that there's got to be something there if the birds are coming from there yeah because we see them elsewhere didn't they sail upwind mostly didn't they always want a return ticket home somehow I've heard about that they were apparently clever about it in the settlement of Polynesia the end result we know that the polynesian discovered every habitable scrap of land in the Pacific up to the sub-antarctic regions tiny scraps of like Pitcairn Island which is what three miles across how do they manage to discover every tiny scrap of land again they were clues as you would on the open ocean even if you couldn't see land there are nevertheless seabirds of which some species go 75 miles from land and all those 50 and others 25 10 miles so even if there's no land visible but they see say boobies or frigate birds they know that there's land over there and then what they'll do and I've done this in the Solomons you wait until late afternoon and then the frigate birds go back to the roost so you see where the frigate birds are heading yeah that tells you that land is there but still you have to pick a path into the open ocean and you don't want it to be suicidal it's thought that what the Polynesians did was that they would do their exploration at times of year when the winds were about to change and so they could they could set out with the wind behind them but they didn't want to turn back when the wind was still carrying them away when the winds were bow changed they would go out 2,000 miles were the winds behind them confident if winds were about to change when the winds change then they would come back and have a ride all the way back so they had guaranteed return ticket home after their exploration if they didn't because they didn't always find an island whose only right I would not say guaranteed Gregor yeah estimates are that the death toll from Polynesian exploration was was ninety percent died Wow and maybe ten percent found something but the canoe that found why if there were about 60 people on the canoe and thirty were men and there was differential matings and one of the men you know once you get there and you arrived in Hawaii the canoe the founder why left behind millions of descendants so the payoff was enormous right oh I see I see for the colonization from New Guinea eastwards it was all Polynesians but by the time that Europeans got into the Pacific Islands like Vanuatu and Fiji were occupied not by Polynesians not just by Polynesians but by so-called Melanesians by people who look like New Guineans it's clear in fact from the archeology the first people to get to Fiji were the ancestors of the Polynesians recognized by the pottery the so called Lapita pottery but after they got there there was trading back and forth and we know that because way out at Fijian and Tonga there is obsidian from islands or Nana's and islands or from Britain and tower say Oh obsidian from New Britain is all the way after Tonga but also tower say obsidian is in Borneo so the people who did these voyages from islands off the coast of New Britain would have gone thousand miles out there in a few thousand miles Wow to the west bringing the news to Melanesians but this leaves the question that you mentioned what about the Micronesia yeah because Polynesians were not the people who settled islands like Guam and pontipee right language shows that those Islands were settled parently directly from the Philippines those again would have been long distant voyages to get from the Philippines to Micronesia like like Pohnpei and Guam and Saipan would have been more than thousand maybe two thousand miles the people from the Philippines would have had to have rewards to induce them to do it but again there are lots of islands in the in that area so we ended up with those three groups and this is where it gets really interesting for me because to me these groups are really oh she right they represent our ancient connection to the our ancient familiarity the resources at the ocean would provide us with and here's where I get into dangerous ground because I'm not an anthropologist and I read I read somewhere once that being an armchair anthropologist is one of the most popular hobbies that people like to do that is talked about it as if they knew something but it seems to me that if you find indigenous communities that have lived by the ocean they have special connections to the ocean they have special knowledge about the ocean they have special abilities about the ocean I'm thinking of the AMA I'm thinking of the Sri Lankan pearl divers is my assumption correct if they're any of those groups that stand out in your mind you could tell me about yeah I can talk about one of those groups they're sometimes called the sea people basically lived on ships from the year around Sulawesi in Indonesia they may have been the people who from Indonesia visited Australia had regular yearly voyages to Australia to get to get beshte MA and introduced various Indonesian things to northern Australia I had one run-in with the sea people it okay it was a potential run-in it ended safely but I was doing bird surveys in the Western papuans I had heard that there was a beautiful Lagoon with undercut coral masses but we couldn't find the interest so we were looking around and then on a beach I saw a couple of big canoes pulled up and I and my friend went over to the beach to ask the people on the beach we as the answer of goon as we landed on the beach I realized Jared this is a potential mistake these are really rough looking people you've walked into them this is like hummingbird mites landing on hummingbird flowers where they're gonna get impaled by the previous occupants so I've landed on the beach to ask the my innocent question are they gonna rob me or kill me because they're really rough looking people yeah and I asked my innocent question to do it I talk to them about birds I said have you seen this bird I imitated some do you know you know this bird and they were friendly and they chatted and they'd probably but those were see people okay okay that was my first encounter with would see people it ended happily but it reminded me afterwards that if you see people on a beach don't just automatically go up to them because might be a bad idea yeah be careful yeah I've had some firsthand experiences with some of these cultures and as you know one of my place where I've done a lot of work is incur bus and I was out diving one day on a boat and I went I surface my friends on the boat we're looking at the horizon pointing at this cloud and talking in Gilbert ease I didn't know what they were saying I got my gear off and I said well what are you guys talking about and they said oh we're just looking at the green cloud and I said what green cloud and he said the green cloud over there and I looked yeah there was kind of a green tinge to the cloud and they said that means there's an island seven miles away under that cloud you couldn't see the island but what we were seeing is the reflection of the vegetation up into the cloud and it was one of a thousand or more navigation techniques that they had developed you know over the generations and millennia and centuries that they had learned about the ocean and they learn the cycles and this indigenous knowledge and I've always wondered about how this knowledge is transmitted like you mentioned the volcano over the horizon and also the bushfire in Australia right now I'm guessing that there was a bushfire once and somebody recorded it and told their kids about it and then the kids told their kids about it and then maybe there was another bushfire a few generations later and they said oh there was this story about something over there and it probably might have been a thousand years of stories until somebody got the gumption up to say let's go see what's going on over there I mean it wasn't like you see a bushfire one day and the next week they're building a boat to go check it out right I mean what what are your thoughts about how this kind of knowledge is transmitted well here are three associations let's do them in pieces okay first your green cloud of some green cloud yeah yeah I'm telling the story not to put you down okay but here goes the story had there was a New Zealander possibly a physician called David Lewis who played a role in quotes rediscovering tradition navigational techniques because he went to Micronesia and he went out with traditional navigators spent a lot of time learning their traditional navigation techniques and how they learned to navigate based on bioluminescence pattern right and waves and of course the Sun and the stars and winds and this and this and that and he felt that he was beginning to understand them and getting good at oh and seabirds and getting good at recognizing when there was an island all right yeah right well one day he was out with his Micronesian friends and in the distance there was a cloud and on the underside of that cloud was what you saw there was a faint green coloration on the underside of the clam so he thought AHA that means that that cloud is over in Ireland and I have gotten really sharp now because I've learned to spot that but these Micronesians with me they didn't notice it you know I'm getting as good as so he began getting very excited said did you see that look there's green under that cleft that means that there's an island there didn't you notice it why do they tell me that and their response was that green under a cloud as a mark of an island that's so obvious that even Europeans noticed that he didn't want to insult you well you know it was obvious once it was pointed out to me and I said you know I've spent my life at sea and I had never noticed this green tinge but now I see it everywhere I go when I look for it so a second thing you asked about what we can learn from traditional to song yes for me the biggest single lesson that I've learned from traditional societies which drives most my friends and my sons and my wife crazy is my attention to anything that could go wrong my paranoia I think of it it's paranoia is something that sends you to a psychiatrist my paranoia is constructive paranoia right it's virtuous it's it's healthy helps me in life I think of whatever could go wrong and as a result I avoid trouble in a way that most Americans don't I learned paranoia of course from New Guineans and the the first incident that drove it home to me was in 1966 when I was with a batch of New Guineans studying birds on a mountain and was time to shift camps and go up the mountain and establish a camp a few thousand feet higher up so we marched up the mountain and in the afternoon we arrived at what seemed to me like a perfect place for campsite it was where the ridge broadened out there was a steep drop-off so I could stand at the end of the edge of the ridge and look out at parrots and Swift's and on the ridge there was an enormous tree straight trunk and so I told the New Guineans with me drop the game and pitch my tent under that tree what a beautiful sight to spend a week and they really got agitated really agile and they said no we what's the matter mmm and finally they said look at that tree it's dead it might fall over on us and look at you okay the tree was dead but it was a tree about nine feet in diameter 100 feet high and I said yeah it'll fall over 75 years from now certainly not going to fall over tonight precisely when I'm sleeping under it but no there was no way that they would sleep under that tree I did they slept about a hundred yards away and of course the tree didn't fall over me that night but as time went on sleeping out in the jungle of New Guinea every night some ways in the distance you hear at a dead tree crashing and falling and eventually I did the numbers and I thought to myself every night here dead tree crashing the chances that if you sleep under a dead tree one night this can hit you it's a one in a thousand forget about it but if like New Guineans like me you're gonna spend three years sleeping out in the jungle and you develop the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees right after three years 1065 nights with a one in 1,000 chance each night you're gonna be dead within three years New Guineans learned to think of the influence of rare events that will catch up to you and that is the most profound lesson that I've learned from that's an amazing story and I've got one for you we were diving in Antarctica some years ago and we used to do this thing where we would anchor to icebergs right and we were diving down the edges of it was grounded actually in place called howl at bay so a very old chunk of an iceberg you know it was the size of a city block but small by antara standards and we were actually underneath it so I could age it because I could see the growth of the invertebrate marine life underneath it which told me how long it had been there I've been there a number of years from three four years so we finish her diving and we're gonna spend the night and I wanted to stay anchored to the iceberg because I thought it was a nice nice protected place and everything but no no the the crew said we are not going to stay anchored to this iceberg so it's been here for five years what are you worried about they said they said go so he pulled the anchor off the iceberg and then we headed out and they'll drop the anchor where it's about to be and we're sitting there and then that night the iceberg came apart that's right it sort of collapsed and as an iceberg collapses it spreads out really rapidly because all the ice floats and it was a catastrophic I'm not so sure it would have killed us but it certainly would have damaged the boat and set us back so I get the dead tree think is that in my case it's the iceberg thing here's an interesting example Greg of where people learn to ignore those risks if your lifestyle if making your living and getting you food requires you to undertake risks but if you expect to live to 90 anyway like I do then you don't take those risks but if your lifestyle means that no matter how careful you are you'll be dead in 30 years then you take the risk an example is the the n-word I'm traditionally in word I've got a lot of their food by spearing seals at holes in the ice they go out onto ice floes onto ice along the coast and wait at a hole for a seal to come up and then spear the seal but there's a risk which is that the ice mass will detach and you'll be carried out to sea and therefore if an in would expected to live 90 years you're not going to go out on to ice floes because you'd be dead but the reality for for traditional Inuit is that their life was so risky that even the best in wood hunter would make a mistake and would expect to live only a thirty forty years anyway and so the unit did things that they knew were dangerous going out onto ice floes because that was the only way that they would get their seals but they also knew that in 3040 years they're gonna be dead anyway so they'd better take these risks whereas you and I yeah hope that we're gonna be alive at 90-95 and therefore therefore I would not sleep under a dead tree no no I don't anymore mr. Jarrod you had a third point that you were gonna tell me about what was that here's an example of traditional knowledge being passed on for many centuries it involves Polynesian inter-island voyage and by the time that Captain Cook came out into the Pacific in the 1770s the Polynesians that stopped in to draw into island voyage and roughly around 1400 and so it's 370 nearly 400 years since Polynesia's made long-distance foraging Captain Cook is in Tahiti and in Tahiti he falls in with a young Tahitian who's I think the the descendant of a family of traditional navigators the young Polynesian then begins to tell Captain Cook about various islands out there that he's never seen but he's heard of him and he's got the names of them one of Captain Cook's associates then asked this Polynesian to name the earth and to point the direction the Polynesian pointed the directions very exactly and then Captain Cook's associate made a map and the map shows at different angles lots of islands were the names of those islands and the distances because this Polynesian said that Island is three three days away that Island is two weeks that's four weeks away so it came back with a map and eventually the the map with the names was compared against existing Polynesian royalism via the actual names of Polynesian islands up to thousands of miles away and this young Polynesian he had the angles correct and he had that the sailing times the sailing distances Wow this was knowledge who was passed on it was remembered Masey century does that map exist the one that cooker oh yeah or whoever it was on the boat drew it the paper and everything the original absolutely you have to look if you read the books of Captain Cook's voyages this map is often reproduced the one that they sketched there on the beach in De Anza by the name of the Polynesian I think his name began with titi it was 1000 or something that's an unmistakable map and and that didn't they take him with them on the boat as they explored and he was able to talk to different peoples that's right yeah when they landed in islands like why Hawaii had been calling discovered colonized by Polynesians at least 700 years before Captain Cook came to Tahiti Captain Cook quote discovered rediscovered Hawaii but he he had a Polynesian with him and when they landed and it happened not just to why but at other islands the Polynesian from Tahiti encountered these Polynesians offshore whose language had diverged for seventh century and so they were in differences but nevertheless he could converse with them as if we today discovered an island that had been colonized after the time the Beowulf but be little before Chaucer and we spoke with with people speaking Old English yes it's hard work to understand Chaucer but nevertheless we could decipher something of it and that's that's what that's the best explanation I've had actually thank you because I've I've thought about the these dialects in the Pacific and how they're different but using that to help me get it as a good one and isn't Icelandic the original Old English no Icelandic is basically old doors Eisner was colonized from Norway and it's a Scandinavian language whereas Old English is dry from Frisian the language that's now spoken on the coast of the Netherlands and Germany the anglo-saxons of Jews who were the people who colonized Britain driving driving out the cells the anglo-saxon Jews ice came from the coasts of Netherlands and Denmark and Germany and Frisian is still spoken there so the Frisian is the modern language most closely related to in and Old English of course is even closer to freezing so when you look at this route South Pacific language did that extend to Melanesia and Micronesia and all the island groups or was there were there any different ations in there or was that is it one cluster there were multiple languages out there to all Polynesian languages are derived from an inferred proto Polynesian and by comparing the different modern Polynesian languages you can recognize the commonalities and figure out what proto Polynesian was like so all Polynesians have languages derived from a single language which is presumably the language of them the pita colonists yeah but after the Polynesians came out there were other people the Melanesians Melanesians who came out so that for example on Vanuatu they're not Polynesian languages they're Melanesian languages possibly from a couple of sources because after the Polynesians settled Vanuatu they were then went back and they brought Melanesians out with them oh yeah here's a good pizza probably a grizzly example of language replacement in the Solomons there are so-called Polynesian outliers in the Solomons the Polynesians went east all the way to Easter Island but then they started coming back and they also sent prospecting voyages out to the west and most of these prospecting voyages ended up on islands that where they were settlers and the settlers would kill or drive off the Polynesians the westernmost island the Polynesians succeeded in occupying is an outlier the Solomons called rental island rental is famous because it's got the biggest freshwater lake of the Pacific which is the old Lagoon Reynold was a coral reef that got lifted 30 feet up into the air and the old Lagoon then became this big freshwater lake the people of Randall Island today they speak a Polynesian language but they're somewhat dark-skinned they're darker skin than Polynesian and they have a tradition that's that said when we arrived at rental on rental there were a people there the heat T and eventually we we killed the heat E and came to occupy rental Island but the fact that the rental island is today on darker skin than other Polynesian implies that yeah if they killed the Headey but they didn't kill all of them you know you took the language I was just with some friends colleagues of mine from Micronesia I was in Fiji about a week since I've seen you I was down in Fiji and they're professionals and they wanted to show me one of them one to show me some text that he was having with his his Micronesian colleague from cure bus and it was just a business text and I read it and then I said hey wait a minute why are you guys writing in English it's your second language and they poked perfectly good English one of them it was pretty heavily accented and I could see him searching for words once in a while but perfectly fluent English like why don't you guys use Gilbert YZ when you're talking to each other in your text he says oh that's an easy answer Greg good so what is it he said if we used our native language it would have to be much longer that's all so Greg a story of some economic significance to me because my books get translated into other languages right and from the editions I can see how much long or how much shorter another language takes to represent my English text what I notice in my German and Italian translations are about 30 to 50 percent longer than my original English and the consequence of that is that for example my book Guns Germs of Steel in English it's about 500 pages long and it's not too heavy but concerns sealed in German is about 900 pages and my last trip to Germany my German friends when I told them that I was working on a new book they said Jared can't you please make you a new book shorter than your previous one because your previous book it's so heavy when we when we try to read it in bed and a holding it above us it's just too heavy and it hurts on next my hands it is funny I've noticed that with Spanish could you see a lot of bilingual signs on trains and stuff and it's in English it'll be in an emergency go to the end of the train and then in Spanish it's in the moments of extreme anxiety go to the extreme end of the it's about twice as long you mentioned Guns Germs and Steel what a landmark book how did you come up with that title it's a great title I mean there is a backstory my wonderful beautiful wife Marie you know contributes so much to my happiness when I had finished Guns Germs of stealing was trying to figure out a title my editor wonderful editor at Norton came up with suggested titles my book agent came up with the job I came up with suggested none of them were any good and finally what were some of the ones before yeah Greg I've suppressed for me this by Guns Germs and Murray came up with guns germs of steel virtue of Guns Germs steel is that the amano syllables yeah and it's it's like they tow boats fitted to it gunnery dirty germs and Steve he's a lucky number yeah yeah my editor in New York objected but the sequence is wrong first came germs and then gone and then steel right and then guns but I said Murray is right who cares about that logical sequence Guns Germs and Steel I was good and then then quite a few of my foreign editions made the mistake of just translating it literally and for example the Italian title of Guns Germs you are me a child in Malatya it's dreadful it's a literal translation of Guns Germs and Steel but the Italians fail to fail to realize that the important thing about it is the sound quality they didn't they did not get Italian mono syllables you know I think I've mentioned to you over the years that uh Peter Benchley the writer of Jaws was one of my very closest friends he's passed away now but they'll give you the quick backstory on the title of Jaws because that's became a kind of a moniker on our culture right jaws the movie about the sharks and all that I remember Peter telling me the story he said Greg we were going to press and we didn't have a title he written a story about a shark that laid seeds to a resort community but no title and his father was a writer and his father gave him some ideas darkness lives below the water you know danger at night there was all these things and and finally his publisher got so frustrated with him he said okay Peter we're gonna call it jaws and Peter said jaws well that's weird what's that mean you know and I think that was one of the big selling points of that whole book actually was a great title it was just this one word like boom title but yours has does have that three its lucky number staccato room service we've just done that Gregg to my current book so the current book will come out next May for years my prospectus and that the working title was crisis and change yeah boy that's a good title short words and it captures the subject the book which in that national political crises but then a friend to whom I gave the book to read um she pointed out Jared there eighty-seven he's just googled there are 87 books with the word crisis in the title and worse yet in 1974 my own publisher little brown had published a book whose title was crisis change in something the words are just too common can't you find a one-word title which does not frequently appear in titles so we tried to find one word title once again my beautiful wife Marie to my enjoy dude oh so much Marie was brainstorming with her cousins and I became upheaval and so that the title of the book will be a people the subtitle then goes on to other stuff but and this is one word time eight we're breaking some news on this on this podcast up evil that's them that's yeah so it's gonna be a great book everyone make sure you go ahead and get upheaval probably by the time this podcast comes out it'll be out you know we talked about indigenous coastal groups and how they you know would see an island and voyage to it or they'd see green on the cloud and there's any number of other things that that are used but there's also some physiological things about humans in the ocean and especially women can you talk about that a little bit I mean it's it's an interesting part of it well especially women because especially men you and I grew up on the coast of New England and yes on the south side of the Cape it's warmer in the north and the day I think is warmer than the ocean but boy I can tell you that Bar Harbor Mount Desert Island the ocean was cold there and yet yet I swam the cold ocean then I wouldn't now in Tasmania Aboriginal Australians filled up all of Australia Tasmania was periodically connected and disconnected from the Australian continent because the seas between Tasmania and Australia or shallow as sea level dropped during the ice ages Tasmania would get connected and then a sea level rose but I could just walk across yeah really oh yeah the way that Aboriginal Australians got to Tasmania and the way the Kangaroos got to Australia in the way that he moves flightless burns got to Australia was just like the Alaska Russian route exactly okay it was a land bridge yeah they walked there and so they arrived thirty thousand years ago and then sea level rose for the last time 10,000 years ago turning to has main you into an Ireland but Tasmanians did not have boats they they had Park rafts or bark news that waterlogged rather quickly so they they could only go at most a few miles with the waters around Tasmania are very cold and yet the waters there they're rich in seafood such as lobsters and Mallis which means that if you're willing to dive into those really cold waters there's good stuff there when Europeans discovered quotes discover Tasmania around 1800 they observed what the Tasmanians did and how they made their living the way that Tasmanians got their lobsters and clams was that the if the women not the men would go diving and they would go down there and get the lobsters and and bring the back to the beach they would then huddle shivering next to a fire the men would take the lobsters and clams away from them and clothe the lobsters and clam but the men never did dive in because women have more body fat than men and women can stand it better than men can women have an extra layer of subcutaneous fat I believe which gives him the insulation and I know that when Magellan came around the tip of South America you were the first person to ever tell me about this group he was the first European to to get down to the very bottom tip of South America what did he find there he found Native Americans yeah the the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego the southern island detached from South America there were three groups there the yoga and the ona and the alcove there of those three groups I think to have died out and one they were just a few people left Darwin also visited Seattle del Fuego he was impressed by the fact that these people were going around in this sleeting climate with it just sleet coming in Furtick horizontally at you and they were wearing very little just as the Tasmanians in Tasmania with us know that as main Ian's did not have tailored clothes they sometimes would have a kangaroo high thrown about their back physiologically they were adapted to living in these really cold climates and this was then tested by a famous Norwegian physiologist copious Shawanda sherlynda was a metabolic physiologist who went around the world studied the physiology of all sorts of people liked Aborigines in the Australian desert but among other things he went to Tierra del Fuego he wanted to understand how Phrygians could deal with us come didn't they dive the four agents they went of the ocean didn't they collect food if Regan's yeah yeah you know they were that's cold that's really cold water there they would get food from the cold water as well so shoal endure to measure their metabolic adaptations he routinely tested people's reaction to cold by having people put a leg in a tall bucket of ice water and then he would measure when they would start shivering and they'd drop in core temperature there's a wonderful picture showing side by side a Phrygian with his foot in an ice bucket and one of shoulders Norwegian colleagues with his foot in the ice bucket and after 15 minutes the Norwegian is shivering and can't stand it and the fragr just sitting there blocks down after have no problem no problem but similarly the inward unknown to be able to tolerate cold much better there now let's talk about tolerating heat and Japanese so Japan is temperate there's no tropical part of Japan this now has to do with the function of our sweat glands right if you look with a microscope at your skin you will see that you have more sweat glands on your skin then you have droplets of sweat when you are sweating which means that of the of your anatomical sweat glands some are functional and some are non-functional he was the observation that set that off after World War one the Japanese occupied German tropical colonies the they occupied Guam Saipan rota and Tinian and so Japanese lots of Japanese colonists went out to these tropical islands baby Japanese were born there some of the colonists from mainland Japan went out theaters one year old babies settled the Marriott Tropical Marianas some Japanese born in the ariana's would go back to Japan at six months one year at four years and so on and some Japanese physiologist noticed that some Japanese are comfortable in the Marianas and some are not comfortable and then they began looking at the skin and they noticed some sweat glands become functional for you and me Gregg proper half of our sweat glands are functional they then looked at functionality of sweat glands in Japanese from mainland Japan who went to the Marianas at one month six months a year two year four years they also looked at Japanese born in the Marianas who came back to mainland Japan at different age and it turns out that that the percentage of your sweat glands that are functional depends upon the climate of your experience during your first two years of life if you are growing up in a tropical climate for two years then essentially all your sweat glands become functional whereas if you're growing up in a cold climate then only half of your swells become functional but what counts is where you spend the first two years and so Japanese who were born in the Marianas oh and at the end two years came back to mainland Japan we're comfortable in mainland Japan in the hot summer we were as Japanese from mainland Japan or Japanese born in the mainland Japan who went out to the Marianas after age three half their sweat glands remain non-functional so it helps you cool yes it helps you cool and that's an example what's called critical period programming is this big thing in development similarly with your eyes whether you can see for the first six months determines whether you'll ever be able to see but it illustrates that your experiences in your first either six months or two years a critical period that depends upon theories really does it make people that were born in the tropical place does it make it harder for them to stay warm in a cold place I don't know whether the opposite of the opposite water set has been done you know there's always that thing about thin blood there was a scientist I believe his name was Holliday and made the remark that only humans can run a mile and swim a mile climb a tree and then dive down into the ocean like thirty feet of all animals on the planet what are your thoughts on the influence of the ocean on human evolution and on human behavior in society if you haven't and I know this right there I've just outlined your neck two or three books you can probably write but sort of top of mind for our audience and for me I'm brainstorming that the oceans lacked influence on human physiology and behavior until whenever we started gathering seafood the archaeological record suggests that the first documented gathering seafoods the first mittens or something like a hundred thousand years ago or meant one can argue maybe they were two hundred thousand rights ago but they were not mittens 1 million years ago so at some point relatively recently when we were Homo sapiens not Neanderthals and not Homo erectus but when we were sapiens and possibly when we were behaviorally modern sapiens that's when we started to exploit marine resources but then this goes back to the point Gregg that that I mentioned about Native Americans from the Pacific Northwest being hunter-gatherers but settled in permanent villages and Native Americans the Colusa tribe of Florida on the Seacoast their places on the Seacoast we have the food sources of rich and hunter-gatherers can settle down but for the most part hunter-gatherers on land don't settle down except in the richest places and so it's possible that that starting to occupy starting to utilize marine resources meant the beginning or at any at least an acceleration of permanent set of living but permanent set of living is is significant because it has least two further consequences one is churning out babies if you're a nomad and you're going to shift camp every day a child cannot keep up with the adults until the child is about four years old and therefore nomadic societies cannot grind out babies every two years because the mother and father they can carry one baby but they can't carry two babies and so nomadic societies use various ways of regulating childbirth so preventing conception so that they space their children four year intervals only when you settle down made possible population explosion that's one consequence of settle down right but the other consequence of settling down is that again if you are gonna shift camp every day you do not want to have a printing press or atomic bomb to carry along with you every day when you shift tamp nomads cannot afford to have heavy technology nomads in fact nomads you don't have pottery it's only settled hunter-gatherers like the hunter-gatherers of Japan and the coast of China that have have pottery so once you settle down you can then afford to have heavy technology but also once you settle down it means you've got a richer lifestyle you've got stored food and that stored food can then be used to feed people who become specialists and sit there and camp playing with dirt and stumble on the idea pottery and stumble on they dare copper and bronze and ventrally atomic progress right you made the great argument about a hundred gatherers could settle down perhaps with a notion providing food do you think it also had any effect on our brain development seafood accounts for something like one third of the protein of the world's human population and disproportionately about poorer people the opposite example is the New Guinea Highlands where I've done so much my work New Guinea Highlanders their diet is especially starch Ruth crops there's not much meat in the New Guinea Highlands because the big animals were all exterminated fifty thousand years ago the meat that's available now is kangaroos but they've got really rare rats spiders literally my my first morning Greg in the New Guinea Highlands in 1964 when I arrived exhaust from my overnight flights and the next morning they were going out hunting boy big excitement we go and refer God then and then I hear excited cries and they are surrounding a big brush pile oh my god they've they've cornered a big kangaroo Wow and a little child goes into the brush and then comes out holding two baby wrens that weighed about one-sixth of an ounce each well to get their protein have to resort to small things New Guineans eat frogs the New Guineans eat eat spiders sizable spiders but a consequence is that kwashiorkor the disease of protein deficiency is widespread and in the New Guinea Hans people get reddish orangish here from protein deficiency when I brought my wife Marie for the first time to New Guinea this September one of the things that struck Marie and really depressed her was to see the kwashiorkor the protein deficient Li was just common in New Guineans because they were on a low protein diet but once you're on the Seacoast and you've got all these fish hunter-gatherers on the Seacoast do not have kwashiorkor okay people have a natural affinity for the ocean if either fascinating that here we are primate right evolutionary tree takes us back to the the primate world but where do people go when they want to go on a vacation in modern society they go to the ocean they don't go climb a tree some people enjoy the force yes and and we live along the coastline for Commerce reasons yes do you think there's any argument there being an affinity and natural affinity to the oceans by human Homo sapiens yes yes gran you can make an argument whether the argument is correct I don't know make an argument and another example people making that argument has to do with claimed human fondness for the savanna yeah so when you show people pictures of an open landscape a parkland a dense forest etc it said that the pictures that people pick out they don't like bare open grassland like step they don't like close far as what they really like is an open parkland savanna and it's claimed that that's a legacy maybe even a genetically programmed legacy over having or having evolved in savannas six million years ago and stayed in savannas before five million years that's the long-standing programming but I can imagine that people have been using the ocean for a hundred thousand years but a hundred thousand years is long enough for genetic programming so maybe the reason why you and I were taken by our parents to the beach and Falmouth and Woods Hole and to Bar Harbor was a hundred thousand years of programming for the I mean a simple question do you have a favorite ocean animal when you ask me do I have a favorite ocean animal I cross out the word ocean I translate your question - do I have a favorite animal we'll go there and my favorite animal New Guinea tree kangaroos they are so adorable so I discovered a previously unknown population of tree kangaroos in the uninhabited for you mountains of Indonesia New Guinea they are red and yellow and pink would spawn discover this oh wow I discovered a big deal when I was helicoptered into the foyer mountains there were these tree kangaroos and they were tame because they had never seen people so yeah they are the most colorful marsupials red yellow pink spots and stripes what do you name him what's what was your Latin scientific name I didn't collect I didn't know young because the these are uninhabited mountains and it wasn't doing any just observational yeah it was observation this tree kangaroo it's so adorable you're just its childlike it's got a short nose and short limbs and Lisa date back a wonderful mother of tree kangaroo conservation sends out a annual report and her annual report just arrived with a pair of tree kangaroos on the cover REE bonded I saw that we took that magazine put it it's on our bathroom now where she's gonna I bet their eyes are big too right oh they're always a big to it today I have an email going out to Lisa Tabak saying Lisa can you send us a PDF so that I can blow it up and get a big picture of those tree kangaroos why because I've just noticed people love creatures of big eyes it's it's I think it's part of our programming and one of the things that's helped pinniped or seal conservation is all you need to do is have a seal you know with those big brown eyes looking up at you you want to pull out your wallet and you know spend money to conserve them whales - there are dozens of things that I can add but let me add one specific thing and that's the the end of Polynesian inter-island voyaging so why is it that Polynesians beginning around 8800 started heading off in every direction evident in order to discover all those arms they had to take a bearing they had to say I have a hunch that that the rising of capella that there's land out there and so that they go out and there was into island voyage and we know from from about 800 to 80 fourteen hundred and eighty fourteen hundred it stopped why did it stop yeah here's my guess why it's not into island void why would you do something as suicidal as set off in a canoe well every now and then a canoe comes back and it says I've discovered this land mass where they were big flightless birds and it's uninhabited this is a great place to colonize and so as long as every now and then a Voyager came back and said I've discovered an uninhabited island that would then motivate further people to come out but by ad 1400 they dog every scrap of land and the Pacific had been colonized and it meant that when Polynesians headed out and they landed somewhere they got killed on the beaches and so even nobody came back or out of the canoe of sixty-two came back and said the other fifty-eight were killed there and so my guess is though that it's when I love that available targets disappeared this inter-island I love that explanation isn't that a good example of Occam's razor I think so too there you know there of course other theories there are anthropologists and archaeologists it's because of change in the ocean currents or change in the wind currents or a shift in star patterns or a rise and sea level desert yeah my guess is it's human psychology maybe you can come back for another episode sometime but I think all right thank you very much Jarrett for taking me on a fascinating ride talking about these since I've always enjoyed it and thank you listeners for being this week [Music] you

Channel: The Sea Has Many Voices

Views: 640

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: jared diamond, jared diamond (author), jared diamond interview, jared diamond writer, jared diamond pulitzer, origin of language, origin of all languages, origin of language documentary, how languages evolve, history of all languages, mapmaking, exploration, ocean exploration, ocean discovery, ocean mysteries, discovery language, Greg Stone ocean, Greg Stone oceanographer, Greg Stone podcast, environmental podcast, best podcast

Id: qIRhE1UDwIc

Length: 55min 53sec (3353 seconds)

Published: Sun May 26 2019