The Rise and Fall of The Third Chimpanzee - Jared Diamond

At some point in my thirties, I felt the need to learn much more about the nature of the world and universe in which I lived, and about what science reveals about human nature.
 
With Jared Diamond’s book, subtitled “How our animal heritage affects the way we live,” I discovered human science made not just meaningful, but compelling accessible. Here was our anthropologically fascinating human story.
 
It was thanks to this book that I first found out that we humans share 98.4% of our DNA with chimpanzees (even in the differing 1.6%, a proportion is junk DNA).
 
Diamond takes on huge questions that as a non-scientist I was only semi-educated about. Such as why we grow old and die, the development of language, or the psychology of genocide.
 
And: why is it that Europeans came to replace most of the native population of North America and Australia, instead of native Americans and Australians coming to replace most of the original population of Europe? A massive question, one that requires an answer based in historical fact in order to expose the fallacy of bigoted and racist assumptions.
 
The short answer is: geographical accident. The susceptibility of endemic mammals to domestication, in particular the horse for ploughing, transport and warfare, and, also in Eurasia, the cow, pig, goat and sheep for a protein-rich diet. In addition to which, the east-west axis of Eurasia allowed for the exchange and development of agriculture, especially wheat, over thousands of miles of climactic stability at the same latitude, whereas the north-south axis of the Americas meant that a tropical buffer halted the spread between more temperate zones of corn and other crops.
 
Not to mention that the wiping out of native peoples by European colonizers was not the result of better genes, but worse germs.
 
Diamond’s book offers an engaging treasure trove of evidence to illustrate and back up the points he is making. From the animal origins of art and the evolution of human sexuality, to a chapter entitled “Why Do We Smoke, Drink, and Take Dangerous Drugs?”