Jared Diamond examines what traditional societies can teach the Western world in “The World Until Yesterday”

When Jared Diamond first began doing field work in the highlands of New Guinea in the 1960s, tribal warfare was a recent memory and writing was still new to many of the tribes, including the Fore, the first tribe that Diamond worked with. Diamond returned to New Guinea many times in the intervening years, and each time, the changes in the people were remarkable. In 1998, he came back to the island to work on an environmental survey and was struck by how different New Guinean society had become in a few short years.

“In the next room, there was a New Guinean using a computer. He was doing engineering diagrams; he was Fore, and his father had been the first person in the southern Fore area who learned how to write,” Diamond says.

The leap from stone tools to computers in just a few decades is drastic, but for Diamond, a professor of geography at UCLA and the author of “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and “Collapse,” the change is not so sudden when viewed with an eye toward history. It’s been slightly more than 5,000 years since human societies began the transition from chiefdoms to organized states. According to Diamond, it was only “yesterday,” historically speaking, that our own society was like those of the tribes in the New Guinea highlands.

In his new book, “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?” Diamond examines traditional societies from around the world and examines how they deal with religion, warfare, violence, the elderly, child-rearing, and health as compared to what he calls “WEIRD” societies: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. In other words, us.

“It’s my most personal book, and I was ready for a personal book,” Diamond says.

Much of “The World Until Yesterday” recounts Diamond’s experiences in New Guinea during the last 50 years. He watched how tribes in the highlands raised children, settled disputes, treated the elderly, and conducted warfare. The goal of the book, Diamond writes, is not to romanticize traditional societies, but to examine how and why they do things differently from us and what we can learn from those differences.

“The fact is, they’re people just like we are. The things they do well tend to be different than things we do well,” he says.

In one chapter, Diamond recounts an incident in which a New Guinea man accidentally struck a young boy with his truck on a mountain road. It was an incident fraught with danger—the truck driver came from a different region than the boy’s family and violence was a possibility. But through a combination of monetary reimbursement from the driver (“sorry money”) and face-to-face resolution with the family, the incident was settled peacefully. Diamond points out that such a process is almost impossible in America, where legal conflicts are the norm and true reconciliation between parties is rarely achieved.

Other areas where we might glean wisdom from traditional societies include child-rearing and how we treat the elderly, according to Diamond. There is more of an emphasis on community and of the whole tribe pitching in to provide for each other.

But the picture is not always so rosy. Infanticide is common in some tribes, and among the Kaulong people of New Britain, it’s customary for widows to be strangled after their husbands die. The widows expect it, and will taunt the men who hesitate to strangle them.

For Diamond, traditional societies represent a sort of laboratory in which we can see different experiments in conducting our lives. Some things, like widow-strangling, are best left behind, but other things, like eating a diet of whole foods with no salt and little sugar, or giving children more care and attention as a whole community, are worth adopting.

For example, working with New Guineans for 50 years has taught Diamond how to think about danger in a different way. He calls it “constructive paranoia”—trying to prevent dangers that will realistically occur in daily life, such as slipping in the shower, and not worrying about unlikely events, like a plane crash.

“If you read the obituary columns, you’ll see that slipping in the shower or on the sidewalk is a major cause of crippling or death for old people. I’m 75 and I hope to live to 90, which means I have 5,475 showers ahead of me in life, and I have to make sure my risk of slipping in the shower is much less than one in a thousand,” he says.

For Diamond, working among the people of New Guinea has altered his life in profound ways. He writes that being in New Guinea is “like seeing the world in bright colors, while everything else is gray.” That vividness is due to both the physical environment and the people, he says.

“It’s not concrete, cars, and smog,” he says. “Even though it’s an island, New Guinea is 16,000 feet high. It goes all the way from tropical rainforest to glaciers. It’s a microcosm of the world.”

But even more vivid are the people. New Guineans love to converse and interact with each other and aren’t distracted by cell phones and laptops.

“They’re looking at you face to face and you’ve got their undivided attention,” Diamond says. “It’s vivid; sometimes, it’s too vivid, but compared to us, it’s much more direct, personal contact.”

Jared Diamond will discuss “The World Until Yesterday” as part of the Writers on a New England Stage series at The Music Hall on Thursday, Jan. 17 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $13. The Music Hall is at 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth.