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Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with.

Jared Diamond

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Jared Diamond
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: September 10
Biologist
Ecologist
Geographer
Ornithologist
Physiologist
Scientist
University Teacher
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Jared Mason Diamond
Jared M. Diamond
Begin
Eurasia
Land
Domesticated
Animal
Largest
Literature
Offered
Part
Ended
World
Wild
Species
Mass

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Why were there far more species of domesticated animals in Eurasia than in the Americas? The Americas harbor over a thousand native wild mammal species, so you might initially suppose that the Americas offered plenty of starting material for domestication.
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I personally am not conscious of my accent.
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All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
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The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!
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The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.
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To dismiss the current extinction wave on the grounds that extinctions are normal events is like ignoring a genocidal massacre on the grounds that every human is bound to die at some time anyway.
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The King's 28 letters have been described by scholars as the world's best alphabet and the most scientific system of writing.
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I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book... and I began putting more work into environmental history.
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Today Charles Darwin is best known for establishing the fact of evolution and for recognizing the major role of natural selection in driving it.
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One person making a wrong decision affects the whole country.
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African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on horses. But it couldnt happen.
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Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas had very few native domesticated animal species from which humans could acquire such diseases.
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Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.
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Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
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[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.
Jared Diamond
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The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are gradually exhausting our fisheries, our topsoil, our water. On top of that, we're coming to the end of world resources.
Jared Diamond
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Infectious diseases introduced with Europeans, like smallpox and measles, spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population.
Jared Diamond
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Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.
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[T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.
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With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.
Jared Diamond