I have learned a great deal from Diamond's books and articles, but even he shows elsewhere that the two leading causes of death across hunter-gatherer societies

I have learned a great deal from Diamond's books and articles, but even he shows elsewhere that the two leading causes of death across hunter-gatherer societies are combat between tribes and homicide within tribes. Agricultural civilization didn't introduce cruelty and ignorance into the human race. As smart and creative a thinker as he is, I don't think he adequately corrects, when he compares overall human well-being today with that of 10,000 years ago, for his perspective as someone who has never gone hungry with no idea of when he would eat again, and who is able to study the sweep of human history only because of the human advances in physical and intellectual resources of the past tens of thousands of years.