This is an ambitious project, and no reviewer can comment on all of it with equal authority. The result is an exciting and absorbing account of human history since the Pleistocene age, which culminates in a sketch of a future scientific basis for studying the history of humans that will command the same intellectual respect as current scientific studies of the history of other natural phenomena such as dinosaurs, nebulas and glaciers. ‘Yali’s question’ plays a central role in Professor Diamond’s enquiry into ‘a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years’, leading him into a wide-ranging discussion of the history of human evolution and diversity through a study of migration, socio-economic and cultural adaptation to environmental conditions, and technological diffusion. In the first chapter the author recounts a conversation that he, a biologist studying bird evolution, had in New Guinea in 1972 with Yali, a local politician preparing his people for self-government, which culminated in the searching question ‘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’. This book is inspired by just such a cross-cultural encounter as that between Kamal the border raider and the Colonel’s son of the Guides. When two strong men stand face to face,though they come from the ends of the earth. Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seatīut there is neither East nor West, Border,nor Breed, nor Birth Oh, East is East, and West is West,and never the twain shall meet,
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