Two Hadza men return from a hunt. The Hadza are one of the few contemporary African societies that live primarily by foraging.

A hunter-gatherer or forager^[1] society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species.

Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were hunter-gatherers until around 10,000 years ago. Following the invention of agriculture hunter-gatherers have been displaced by farming or pastoralist groups in most parts of the world. Only a few contemporary societies are classified as hunter-gatherers, and many supplement, sometimes extensively, their foraging activity with farming and/or keeping animals.

History[link]

The earliest humans probably lived primarily on scavenging, not actual hunting. Early humans in the Lower Paleolithic lived in mixed habitats which allowed them to collect seafood, eggs, nuts, and fruits besides scavenging. Rather than killing large animals themselves for meat, they used carcasses of large animals killed by other predators or carcasses from animals that died by natural causes.^[2]

Hunting and gathering was presumably the subsistence strategy employed by human societies beginning some 1.8 million years ago, by Homo erectus, and from its appearance some 0.2 million years ago by Homo sapiens. It remained the only mode of subsistence until the end of the Mesolithic period some 10,000 years ago, and after this was replaced only gradually with the spread of the Neolithic Revolution.

Starting at the transition between the Middle to Upper Paleolithic period, some 80,000 to 70,000 years ago, some hunter-gatherers bands began to specialize, concentrating on hunting a smaller selection of (often larger than had previously been hunted) game and gathering a smaller selection of food. This specialization of work also involved creating specialized tools like fishing nets and hooks and bone harpoons.^[3] The transition into the subsequent Neolithic period is chiefly defined by the unprecedented development of nascent agricultural practices. Agriculture originated and spread in several different areas including the Middle East, Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes beginning as early as 10,000 years ago.

Forest gardening was also being used as a food production system in various parts of the world over this period. Forest gardens originated in prehistoric times along jungle-clad river banks and in the wet foothills of monsoon regions. In the gradual process of families improving their immediate environment, useful tree and vine species were identified, protected and improved whilst undesirable species were eliminated. Eventually superior foreign species were selected and incorporated into the gardens.^[4]

Many groups continued their hunter-gatherer ways of life, although their numbers have perpetually declined partly as a result of pressure from growing agricultural and pastoral communities. Many of them reside in arid regions and tropical forests in the developing world. Areas which formerly were available to hunter-gatherers were—and continue to be—encroached upon by the settlements of agriculturalists. In the resulting competition for land use, hunter-gatherer societies either adopted these practices or moved to other areas. In addition, Jared Diamond has blamed a decline in the availability of wild foods, particularly animal resources. In North and South America, for example, most large mammal species had gone extinct by the end of the Pleistocene, according to Diamond, because of overexploitation by humans,^[5] although the overkill hypothesis he advocates is strongly contested.

As the number and size of agricultural societies increased, they expanded into lands traditionally used by hunter-gatherers. This process of agriculture-driven expansion led to the development of the first forms of government in agricultural centers such as the Fertile Crescent, Ancient India, Ancient China, Olmec, Sub-Saharan Africa and Norte Chico.

As a result of the now near-universal human reliance upon agriculture, the few contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures usually live in areas unsuitable for agricultural use.

Americas[link]

See also: Paleo-Indians period (Canada) and History of Mesoamerica (Paleo-Indian)

Evidence suggests big-game hunter gatherers crossed the Bering Strait from Asia (Eurasia) into North America over a land bridge (Beringia), that existed between 47,000–14,000 years ago.^[6] Around 18,500–15,500 years ago, these hunter-gatherers are believed to have followed herds of now-extinct pleistocene megafauna along ice-free corridors that stretched between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets.^[7] Another route proposed is that, either on foot or using primitive boats, they migrated down the Pacific coast to South America.^[8][9]

Hunter-gatherers would eventually flourish all over the Americas, primarily based in the Great Plains of the United States and Canada, with offshoots as far east as the Gaspé Peninsula on the Atlantic coast, and as far south as Chile, Monte Verde.^[10] American hunter-gatherers were spread over a wide geographical area, thus there were regional variations in lifestyles. However, all the individual groups shared a common style of stone tool production, making knapping styles and progress identifiable. This early Paleo-Indian period lithic reduction tool adaptations have been found across the Americas, utilized by highly mobile bands consisting of approximately 20 up to 60 members of an extended family.^[11]

The Archaic period in the Americas saw a changing environment featuring a warmer more arid climate and the disappearance of the last megafauna.^[12] The majority of population groups at this time were still highly mobile hunter-gatherers; but now individual groups started to focus on resources available to them locally, thus with the passage of time there is a pattern of increasing regional generalization like, the Southwest, Arctic, Poverty, Dalton and Plano traditions. This regional adaptations would become the norm, with reliance less on hunting and gathering, with a more mixed economy of small game, fish, seasonally wild vegetables and harvested plant foods.^[13][14]

Common characteristics[link]

A San man from Namibia. Fewer than 10,000 San live in the traditional way, as hunter-gatherers. Since the mid-1990s the central government of Botswana has been trying to move San out of their lands.^[15]

Habitat and population[link]

Hunter-gatherer societies tend to be relatively mobile, given their reliance upon the ability of a given natural environment to provide sufficient resources in order to sustain their population and the variable availability of these resources owing to local climatic and seasonal conditions. Individual band societies tend to be small in number (10-50 individuals), but these may gather together seasonally to temporarily form a larger group (100 or more) when resources are abundant. In a few places where the environment is especially productive, such as that of the Pacific Northwest coast or Jomon-era Japan, hunter-gatherers are able to settle permanently.^{[citation needed]}

Hunter-gatherer settlements may be either permanent, temporary, or some combination of the two, depending upon the mobility of the community. Mobile communities typically construct shelters using impermanent building materials, or they may use natural rock shelters, where they are available.^{[citation needed]}

Social and economic structure[link]

Hunter-gatherer societies also tend to have relatively non-hierarchical, egalitarian social structures. This might have been more pronounced in the more mobile societies.

Full-time leaders, bureaucrats, or artisans are rarely supported by these societies.^[16][17][18] In addition to social and economic equality in hunter-gatherer societies there is often, though not always, sexual parity as well.^[16][19] Hunter-gatherers are often grouped together based on kinship and band (or tribe) membership.^[19]

In a few groups, such as the Haida of present-day British Columbia, lived in such a rich environment that they could remain sedentary or semi-nomadic, like many other Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest coast.

Violence in hunter-gatherer societies is usually rare, caused by grudges and vendettas.^[19] Warfare over land was rare and with few fatalities as tribes could easily move to unoccupied or easily invaded areas. The land was seen as belonging to all and owned by none.

A vast amount of ethnographic and archaeological evidence demonstrates that the sexual division of labor in which men hunt and women gather wild fruits and vegetables is an uncommon phenomenon among hunter-gatherers worldwide. Although most of the gathering is usually done by women, a society in which men completely abstained from gathering easily available plants has yet to be found. Generally women hunt the majority of the small game while men hunt the majority of the large and dangerous game, but there are quite a few documented exceptions to this general pattern. A study done on the Aeta people of the Philippines states: "About 85% of Philippine Aeta women hunt, and they hunt the same quarry as men. Aeta women hunt in groups and with dogs, and have a 31% success rate as opposed to 17% for men. Their rates are even better when they combine forces with men: mixed hunting groups have a full 41% success rate among the Aeta."^[17]

It was also found among the Ju'/hoansi people of Namibia that women helped the men during hunting by helping them track down quarry.^[20] Moreover, recent archaeological research done by the anthropologist and archaeologist Steven Kuhn from the University of Arizona suggests that the sexual division of labor did not exist prior to the Upper Paleolithic and developed relatively recently in human history. The sexual division of labor may have arisen to allow humans to acquire food and other resources more efficiently.^[21] It would, therefore, be an over-generalization to say that men always hunt and women always gather. It is more of a relatively recent human "invention" that by increasing efficiency was beneficial to both sexes.

A 19th century engraving of an Indigenous Australian encampment.

At the 1966 "Man the Hunter" conference, anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore suggested that egalitarianism was one of several central characteristics of nomadic hunting and gathering societies because mobility requires minimization of material possessions throughout a population; therefore, there was no surplus of resources to be accumulated by any single member. Other characteristics Lee and DeVore proposed were flux in territorial boundaries as well as in demographic composition.

At the same conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, "Notes on the Original Affluent Society", in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers living lives "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their "affluence" came from the idea that they are satisfied with very little in the material sense. This, he said, constituted a Zen economy.^[22] These people met the same requirements as their sedentary neighbors through much less complex means.

Mutual exchange and sharing of resources (i.e., meat gained from hunting) are important in the economic systems of hunter-gatherer societies.^[19] Therefore, these societies can be described as based on a gift economy.

Variability[link]

Hunter-gatherer societies manifest significant variability, depending on climate zone/life zone, available technology and societal structure.

One way to divide hunter-gatherer groups is by their return systems. James Woodburn uses the categories "immediate return" hunter-gatherers for egalitarian and "delayed return" for nonegalitarian. Immediate return foragers consume their food within a day or two after they procure it. Delayed return foragers store the surplus food (Kelly,^[23] 31).

Hunting-gathering was the common human mode of subsistence throughout the Paleolithic, but the observation of current-day hunters and gatherers does not necessarily reflect Paleolithic societies; the hunter-gatherer cultures examined today have had much contact with modern civilization and do not represent "pristine" conditions found in uncontacted peoples.^[24]

The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is not necessarily a one way process. It has been argued that hunting and gathering represents an adaptive strategy which may still be exploited, if necessary, when environmental change causes extreme food stress for agriculturalists.^[25] In fact, it is sometimes difficult to draw a clear line between agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies, especially since the widespread adoption of agriculture and resulting cultural diffusion that has occurred in the last 10,000 years.^{[citation needed]} This anthropological view has remained unchanged since the 1960s.^{[clarification needed][citation needed]}

Modern context[link]

Shoshoni tipis, circa 1900.

In the early 1980s, a small but vocal segment of anthropologists and archaeologists attempted to demonstrate that contemporary groups usually identified as hunter-gatherers do not, in most cases, have a continuous history of hunting and gathering, and that in many cases their ancestors were agriculturalists and/or pastoralists who were pushed into marginal areas as a result of migrations, economic exploitation, and/or violent conflict. The result of their effort has been the general acknowledgement that there has been complex interaction between hunter-gatherers and non-hunter-gatherers for millennia.^{[citation needed]}

Some of the theorists who advocate this "revisionist" critique imply that, because the "pure hunter-gatherer" disappeared not long after colonial (or even agricultural) contact began, nothing meaningful can be learned about prehistoric hunter-gatherers from studies of modern ones (Kelly,^[26] 24-29; see Wilmsen^[27])

Lee and Guenther have rejected most of the arguments put forward by Wilmsen.^[28][29]

Many hunter-gatherers consciously manipulate the landscape through cutting or burning undesirable plants while encouraging desirable ones, some even going to the extent of slash-and-burn to create habitat for game animals. These activities are on an entirely different scale than those associated with agriculture, but they are nevertheless domestication on some level. Today, almost all hunter-gatherers depend to some extent upon domesticated food sources either produced part-time or traded for products acquired in the wild.

Some agriculturalists also regularly hunt and gather (e.g. farming during the frost-free season and hunting during the winter). Still others in developed countries go hunting, primarily for leisure. In the Brazilian rainforest, groups which recently did or continue to rely on hunting and gathering techniques seem to have adopted this lifestyle, abandoning most agriculture, as a way to escape colonial control and as a result of the introduction of European diseases reducing their populations to levels where agriculture became difficult.^{[citation needed]}

Three Indigenous Australians on Bathurst Island in 1939. According to Peterson (1998), the island was a population isolated for 6,000 years until the eighteenth century. In 1929, three quarters of the population supported themselves off the bush.^[30]

There are nevertheless a number of contemporary hunter-gatherer peoples who, after contact with other societies, continue their ways of life with very little external influence. One such group is the Pila Nguru or the Spinifex People of Western Australia, whose habitat in the Great Victoria Desert has proved unsuitable for European agriculture (and even pastoralism).^{[citation needed]}Another are the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, who live on North Sentinel Island and to date have maintained their independent existence, repelling attempts to engage with and contact them.^{[citation needed]}

See also[link]

• Modern hunter-gatherers and other Nomads
• Anarcho-primitivism
• Human migration
• History of the world
• Indigenous peoples
• Neolithic Revolution
• Origins of society
• Paleolithic
• Prehistoric music
• Primitive skills

Groups or societies[link]

• Batek
• Bushmen
• Cimba people
• Cro-Magnon
• Hadza people
• Homo erectus
• Indigenous Australians
• Inuit
• Man of Flores
• Mbuti
• Neanderthals
• Nukak-Makú
• Pirahã
• Pygmies
• Sentinelese
• Spinifex People
• Uncontacted tribes
• Yupik

Social movements[link]

• Anarcho-primitivism, which strives for the abolishment of civilization and the return to a life in the wild.
• Freeganism involves gathering of food (and sometimes other materials) in the context of an urban or suburban environment.
• Gleaning involves the gathering of food that traditional farmers have left behind in their fields.
• Paleolithic diet, which strives to achieve a diet similar to that of ancient hunter-gatherer groups.
• Paleolithic lifestyle, which extends the paleolithic diet to other elements of the hunter-gatherer way of life, such as movement and contact with nature

References[link]

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

• Nature's Secret Larder - Wild Foods & Hunting Tools.
• A wiki dedicated to the scientific study of the diversity of foraging societies without recreating myths
• Balmer, Yves (2003–2009). "Ethnological videos clips. Living or recently extinct traditional tribal groups and their origins". Andaman Association. http://www.andaman-video.org. 

Jared Diamond
Born	Jared Mason Diamond (1937-09-10) September 10, 1937 (age 74) Boston, Massachusetts
Residence	United States
Citizenship	American
Fields	Physiology Biophysics Ornithology Environmentalism Ecology Geography Evolutionary Biology Anthropology
Institutions	University of California, Los Angeles
Alma mater	Harvard College Cambridge University
Notable awards	Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science (1997) Royal Society Prize for Science Books (1992, 1998 & 2006) Pulitzer Prize (1998) National Medal of Science (1999)

Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Originally trained in physiology, Diamond's work is known for drawing from a variety of fields, and he is currently Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Biography[link]

Diamond was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Bessarabian Jewish family. His father Louis K. Diamond was a physician and his mother Flora Kaplan a teacher, musician, and linguist. He attended the Roxbury Latin School and earned an A.B. from Harvard College in 1958 and a Ph.D. in physiology and membrane biophysics from the University of Cambridge in 1961.

After graduating from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became Professor of Physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties, he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology, specialising in New Guinea and nearby islands. Then in his fifties, Diamond developed a third career in environmental history and became Professor of Geography at UCLA, his current position.^[1] He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1999^[2] and an honorary doctorate by Westfield State University in 2009.

Diamond is married to Marie Diamond (née Marie Nabel Cohen), granddaughter of Polish politician Edward Werner, and has two adult sons.^{[citation needed]}

Work[link]

Diamond's original specialism was salt absorption in the gall bladder.^[3] He has also published scholarly works in the fields of ecology and ornithology, but is best known for authoring of a number of popular science books combining topics from diverse fields other than those he has formally studied. Because of this diversity Diamond has been described as a polymath.^[4][5]

Diamond's first popular book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991), examined human evolution and its relevance to the modern world, incorporating evidence from anthropology, evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology, and linguistics. It was well-received by critics and won the 1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books^[6] and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.^[7] In 1997, he followed this up with Why is Sex Fun?, which focused in on the evolution of human sexuality, again drawing from anthropology, ecology, and evolutionary biology.

His third and best known popular science book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, was published in 1997. In it, Diamond sought to explain the political and economic dominance of Eurasian societies over those from other parts of the world throughout history. Using evidence archaeological and historical case studies and evidence from genetics and linguistics, he argued that gaps in power and technology between human societies are not primarily caused by cultural or racial differences, but originated in environmental differences amplified by various positive feedback loops. According to Diamond the geography and ecology of the Eurasian landmass gave societies there an advantage over those on other continents, which they were subsequently able to dominate or conquer. Guns, Germs, and Steel was a best-seller and received several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, an Aventis Prize for Science Books^[6] and the 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. However the work was criticised for factual inaccuracies in some of Diamond's case studies, and more generally as an argument for environmental determinism. A television documentary based on the book was produced by the National Geographic Society in 2005.

Diamond's next book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), examined a range of past civilizations in an attempt to identify why they either collapsed or succeeded, and considers what contemporary societies can learn from these historical examples. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, he argued against explanations for the failure of past societies based primarily on cultural factors, instead focusing on ecology. Among the societies mentioned in the book are the Norse and Inuit of Greenland, the Maya, the Anasazi, the indigenous people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Japan, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and modern Montana. Similarly Collapse was again both critically acclaimed and criticised for environmental determinism and specific factual inaccuracies.^[8] It was nominated for Royal Society Prize for Science Books.^[6]

Diamond's most recent book Natural Experiments of History, co-edited with James Robinson, is a collection of essays illustrating the multidisciplinary and comparative approach to the study of history that he advocates.^[9]

[edit] Vengeance Is Ours (2008)

On 21 April 2009, Henep Isum Mandingo and Hup Daniel Wemp of Papua New Guinea filed a $10 million USD defamation lawsuit against Diamond over a 2008 New Yorker magazine article entitled "Vengeance Is Ours: What Can Tribal Societies Tell Us About Our Need to Get Even?"^[10] Mandingo and Wemp claimed the article, an account of feuds and vengeance killings in the New Guinea highlands, misrepresented and embellished their involvement in inter-tribal violence.^[11] The lawsuit came after Rhonda Roland Shearer alleged that the New Yorker article contained factual inaccuracies – most notably that Mandingo was fit and healthy, not, as claimed by Diamond, wheelchair-bound after being injured in fighting.^[12]

Diamond and the New Yorker both stood by the article, maintaining that it was a faithful account of the story related to Diamond by Wemp while they worked together in 2001 and again in a formal interview in 2006. They said that the article was based on "detailed notes", that both Diamond and the magazine did all they reasonably could to verify the story, and that in a recorded phone interview conducted in August 2008 by Chris Jennings, a fact checker for the New Yorker, Wemp did not raise any significant objections.^[13] Wemp contends he told Jennings the story was "inaccurate, inaccurate".^[12] According to anthropologist Pauline Wiessner, an expert on tribal warfare in Papua New Guinea, young men often exaggerate or make up entirely their exploits in tribal warfare; she stated that Diamond would have been naïve to accept Wemp's stories at face value.^[13]

Selected publications[link]

Books[link]

• 1972 Avifauna of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea, Publications of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, No. 12, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 438.[1]
• 1975 M. L. Cody and J. M. Diamond, eds. Ecology and Evolution of Communities. Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
• 1979 J. M. Diamond and M. LeCroy. Birds of Karkar and Bagabag Islands, New Guinea. Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist. 164:469–531
• 1984 J. M. Diamond. The Avifaunas of Rennell and Bellona Islands. The Natural History of Rennell Islands, British Solomon Islands 8:127–168
• 1986 J. M. Diamond and T. J. Case. eds. Community Ecology. Harper and Row, New York
• 1986 B. Beehler, T. Pratt, D. Zimmerman, H. Bell, B. Finch, J. M. Diamond, and J. Coe. Birds of New Guinea. Princeton University Press,Princeton
• 1992 The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, ISBN 0-06-098403-1
• 1997 Why is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality, ISBN 0-465-03127-7
• 1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-06131-0
• 2001 The Birds of Northern Melanesia: Speciation, Ecology, & Biogeography (with Ernst Mayr), ISBN 0-19-514170-9
• 2003 Guns, Germs, and Steel Reader's Companion, ISBN 1-58663-863-7.
• 2005 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-303655-6.
• 2010 Natural Experiments of History (with James A. Robinson). ISBN 0-674-03557-7 ISBN 978-0674035577

Articles[link]

• Island Biogeography and the Design of Natural Reserves (1976), in Robert M. May's Theoretical Ecology: Principles and Applications, Blackwell Scientific Publications, pp. 163–186.
• Ethnic differences. Variation in human testis size. (April 1986) Nature 320(6062):488–489 PubMed.
• The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race (May 1987) Discover pp. 64–66
• Japanese Roots (June 1998) Discover
• Curse and Blessing of the Ghetto (March 1991) Discover, pp. 60–66
• Race Without Color (November 1994) Discover
• The Curse of QWERTY (April 1997) Discover
• Kinship With The Stars (May 1997) Discover
• Japanese Roots (June 1998) Discover
• What’s Your Consumption Factor? (January 2, 2008) The New York Times
• Vengeance is Ours (April 2008) The New Yorker
• Diamond, Jared (2011). "Why do some societies make disastrous decisions?". In John Brockman. Culture: leading scientists explore civilizations, art, networks, reputation, and the on-line revolution. New York: Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-06-202313-1. 

Boards[link]

• Editorial board, Skeptic Magazine, a publication of The Skeptics Society
• Member, the American Philosophical Society
• Member, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Member, the National Academy of Sciences
• US regional director of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF/World Wildlife Fund)

Awards and honors[link]

• 1961–1965 Prize Fellowship in Physiology, Trinity College, Cambridge, England
• 1968–1971 Lederle Medical Faculty Award
• 1972 Distinguished Teaching Award, UCLA Medical Class
• 1973 Distinguished Teaching Award, UCLA Medical Class
• 1975 Distinguished Achievement Award, American Gastroenterological Association
• 1976 Kaiser Permanente/Golden Apple Teaching Award
• 1976 Nathaniel Bowditch Prize, American Physiological Society
• 1978 American Ornithologists Union, elected fellow
• 1979 Franklin L. Burr Award, National Geographic Society
• 1985 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant
• 1989 Archie Carr Medal
• 1990 MacArthur Foundation Fellow
• 1992 Tanner Lecturer, University of Utah and many other endowed lectureships
• 1992 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books for The Third Chimphanzee^[6]
• 1992 Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize^[7]
• 1993 Zoological Society of San Diego Conservation Medal
• 1994 Skeptics Society, Randi Award
• 1995 Honorary doctor of literature, Sejong University, Korea
• 1996 Faculty Research Lecturer, UCLA
• 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel
• 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel
• 1998 Elliott Coues Award, American Ornithologists' Union
• 1998 California Book Awards, Gold Medal in nonfiction for Guns, Germs and Steel
• 1998 Aventis Prize for Science Books for Guns, Germs and Steel^[6]
• 1998 International Cosmos Prize^[1]
• 1999 Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction
• 1999 National Medal of Science
• 2001 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement
• 2002 Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science
• 2006 Royal Society Prize for Science Books for Collapse^[6]
• 2006 Dickson Prize in Science
• 2008 Ph.D. Honoris Causa at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

See also[link]

• Assembly rules

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jared Diamond

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jared Diamond

• Diamond's page at the UCLA Department of Geography
• UCLA Spotlight – Jared Diamond
• Edge – Jared Diamond

Lectures and talks[link]

• Why societies collapse at TED, 2003
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed at The Earth Institute at Columbia University, April 2007
• The Evolution of Religions at the Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California
• PBS – Guns, Germs and Steel (with full transcripts)

Interviews[link]

• Hammer Conversation with Jared Diamond and John Long, March 16 2010
• Interview with Charlie Rose
• Interview with New Books in History