The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (82 page)

Plate 27.
Modern feasting. Americans and members of other affluent modern societies “feast” (i.e., consume in excess of their daily needs) three times every day, eat fattening foods (fried chicken in this case), become obese, and may end up with diabetes. (
Chapter 11
)

Plate 28.
A victim of diabetes?: the composer Johann Sebastian Bach. His puffy face and hands in this sole authenticated portrait, and his deteriorating handwriting and vision in his later years, are consistent with a diagnosis of diabetes. (
Page 449
)

Plate 29.
First contact: Ishi, the last surviving Yahi Indian from California, on August 29, 1911, the day that he emerged from hiding and entered Euro-American society. He was terrified and exhausted, and expected to be killed. (
Page 398
)

Plate 30.
First contact between New Guinea Highlanders, who had never previously seen a European, and the Australian miner Dan Leahy, in the Chuave area in 1933. (
Pages 2
,
4
, and
58
)

Plate 31.
First contact: a New Guinea Highlander weeps in terror at his first sight of a European, during the 1933 Leahy Expedition. (
Pages 2
and
58
)

Plate 32.
Traditional trade: a canoe of New Guinea traders, carrying goods to be given to traditional trade partners in return for other goods. (
Page 60
)

Plate 33.
Modern trade: a professional store-keeper, selling manufactured goods to anyone who enters the store, in return for the government’s money. (
Page 61
)

Plate 34.
A modern border between nations: a Chinese trader presenting his passport and visa to a Russian police officer near the Russia-China border. (
Page 37
)

Plate 35.
Ellie Nesler, a California woman tried for killing a man charged with sexually abusing her son. Any parent will understand Ellie’s outrage. But the essence of state justice is that government would collapse if citizens took justice into their own hands. (
Page 98
)

Plate 36.
Traditional warfare: Dani tribesmen fighting with spears in the Baliem Valley of the New Guinea Highlands. The highest one-day death toll in those wars occurred on June 4, 1966, when northern Dani killed face-to-face 125 southern Dani, many of whom the attackers would personally have known (or known of). The death toll constituted 5% of the southerners’ population. (
Chapter 3
)

Plate 37.
Modern warfare: the Hiroshima atomic bomb cloud of August 6, 1945. The American soldiers who dropped the bomb did not personally know their victims and did not look them in the face as they were killing them. The 100,000 Japanese killed at Hiroshima represent the highest one-day death toll in modern warfare, and constituted 0.1% of Japan’s population at that time. That is, large modern populations are associated with high absolute death tolls in modern warfare, but the methods of traditional warfare can result in much higher proportional death tolls. (
Pages 127
and
142
)

Plate 38.
Traditional transport of children commonly places the child in immediate physical contact with the care-giver, vertically erect, looking forward, and thus seeing the same field of view as the care-giver. This is a Pume Indian baby from Venezuela being carried by an older sister. (
Pages 185
,
188
, and
201
)