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.

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

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.

What did the last Easter Islander say as he chopped down the last tree? The Easter Islanders didnt have anthropologists.

Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north.

For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.

Australia is the most isolated continent.