Yali is
described by Diamond in theto Guns, Germs, and Steel as a "remarkable
local politician" in New Guinea, where the author was doing field research on bird
evolution. Diamond writes that Yali, a very intelligent and perceptive man, was asking him
"lots of probing questions." Perhaps the deepest of these questions was the one that
forms the inquiry at the heart of :
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?
By
"cargo," Diamond writes, Yali meant material goods, the trappings of technology,
"ranging from steel axes, matches, and medicines to clothing, soft drinks, and
umbrellas." As Diamond perceived it, this very simple question "went to the heart of
life as Yali experienced it," and it raised very significant questions about the course of
human history in general. Diamond says that Guns, Germs, and Steel was
written as an attempt to provide an answer to Yali's...
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