If you've read Guns, Germs and Steel or Collapse you know what to expect from Jared Diamond- a blizzard of fascinating facts, insights and theories that will spark tens of conversations among your like minded friends and colleagues.

Diamond is a master of spinning hard fact and intriguing theory into readable books, and he does so again in The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution & Future of the Human Animal,
exploring the link between humans and the beings we call apes (Diamond argues against such a distinction, and posits that humans are simply a third variety of chimpanzee) and the evolution of human bodies, minds and culture.

If you're in the mood for an interesting and informative info-dump you've come to the right book. Diamond explores high and low, illuminating research ranging from comparisons of genitalia size (There's reason why 'Hung like a Gorilla' is not a popular phrase) and the theories behind these differences, the possible reasons behind Homo Sapiens' sudden technological leap beyond our early origins and our cousins the Neanderthals, and finally a discussion of the threats to our existence that Diamond later devoted Collapse to. Diamond weaves his own experiences working with remote tribes in Papua New Guinea into the narrative and I that found this aspect of his storytelling balances the more fact heavy sections well.

I learned a great deal from this book about the evolution of my own body, and the ways that the human form could indicate social and behavioral traits to a neutral observer (Diamond uses the example of Aliens viewing our species for the first time). Diamond makes these learnings both accessible and interesting and I experienced a number of out-loud-wow-science exclamation moments while reading this book.

If you're at all interested in evolutionary theory and our genetic proximity to our forest-dwelling relatives, you should read this book. If you're still uncertain that we're related to chimpanzees and gorillas, you too, should read it (I guarantee you'll be convinced we should have been inviting Bonzo and Harambe to our family barbecues). If you're really, really certain we aren't related to 'apes' and you aren't interested in being convinced otherwise.... well, I suspect you aren't browsing this section of the library/bookstore anyway.

Diamond’s, “Guns Germs and Steal was an important juncture in my reading life and my understanding of the human world. I have subsequently read all of his works. The Third Chimpanzee had been hanging in my reading conscience for some time and when it became available, I jumped at the opportunity to read, examine and digest Diamond’s take on so many aspects of what it is to be human and how we reached where we are today.
It wasn’t till I read Diamond’s statement that the world’s population was 5 billion that I realised that this publication is now thirty years old. It has certainly stood the test of time.
In these times of anti-science, it is comforting and challenging to dive into such a well written sweep of human history. I do not have the knowledge to challenge any of Diamond’s assertions (not like a few quasi-polymaths who write reviews) but what this book does for me is to stimulate and challenge. There were times when I would pause, rest the book on my knees and reflect on what I had just read. Diamond’s discussion of how public the act of sex is for so many of our close relatives yet for us it is an extremely private affair. The short period of time when women are able to become pregnant and how there is no physical demonstration when this time occurs. The importance of language has been crucial in homosapien development. I had always believed that the control of fire led to humans consuming more meat, therefore more protein and subsequent brain development. Diamond argues against that idea.
The role of elders in non-literate societies was fascinating. The reason that some societies developed technology while others didn’t was illuminating. With the kangaroo being the only large mammal one can see why the Australian Aborigine never developed the wheel. The reason why some animals can be domesticated. Have you ever tried putting a saddle on a zebra!
Diamond’s numerous reference to his work in New Guinea is most interesting and brings a personal touch to his scientific writing.
Diamond is a great scientist and an accomplished writer. This mix has led to the creation of a timeless text that can still be read some thirty years after it was first published.

Good book but not quite as good as  Guns, Germs, and Steel. This book was written before that one and you can tell that  Jared Diamond becomes a more polished and focused writer. The Third Chimpanzee focuses on how many of the characteristics the we consider uniquely "human" (language, art, murder) really aren't as unique as we think. He makes good arguments but maybe takes on more than he should. Still, it sets the stage for Diamond's later works (including  Collapse which I still haven't read. 3.5 stars

I've read Diamond's Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel and had never heard of this book before, so when I saw it at the bookstore I picked it up because I thought it was his new book. It wasn't. It was his first book, and it shows. This is basically a primer for the rest of his books, since all his other books are expansions of chapters/sections in this one. Why is Sex Fun? is Chapter 3, Guns, Germs and Steel is Part 4 and Collapse is Part 5.

My problem with this book, besides the fact that I'd read some of it before, was that while most of his arguments were interesting, some weren't convincing. He sometimes kinda relied on personal anecdotes--mostly from his New Guinea friends--and broad generalizations instead of facts. The chapter I had the biggest issue with was "Why Do We Smoke, Drink, and Use Drugs?" His answer is: because, like peacocks' tails and other seemingly useless/potentially dangerous displays, it shows others that I can have/do this crap and still survive, so obviously there's enough awesome about me that it outweighs this stupid thing I do, so you don't want to mess with me if you're a predator/you should want to mate with me if you are a female. He states that "Now, let's test my theory...if it's valid, [it:] should apply to other societies as well." So he brings up this one guy he knows in Indonesia who drinks kerosene as a test of strength. Okay...and that proves your theory how exactly? To be fair, he also mentions Native American tribes that used drug enemas, but still. He doesn't address other possible factors, such as the benefits people feel they get out of drugs and alocohol (mood boosts/escapism/whatever) or their addictive nature. That entire chapter seemed like a 10th grade paper: lots of suppositions, little to concretly back it up.

The book did bring up ideas I'd never thought about before, and made me feel less special as a human being, but I'd still say just read Diamond's later, better books and skip this one.

Jared Diamond should be required reading. He has influenced my view of humanity and history more than probably anyone except maybe a history professor in college, where I was a history minor. No, I think I Diamond has influenced me more.

I stumbled across a 3 part series on PBS based on Guns, Germs and Steel a couple of years ago and was floored. I bought and read the book immediately and was even more blown away. Since then I have read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Why is Sex Fun. Both of them were also mind-blowing and insightful.

The Third Chimpanzee was Diamond’s first book and it really lays the groundwork for his three following. In fact 3C read a bit like an abridged version of the other three books combined. But that is not to say it did not contain things the other books didn’t….or at least that I don’t remember. The next time I recommend Diamond to a friend, I think I will recommend 3C because it is a great overview of his works.

I was particularly struck by the chapters on language, both animal languages that are only beginning to be unraveled, as well as the information on human languages.

The book also contains a striking chapter about genocide. It was a tough chapter to read and teetered on the edge of being overwhelmingly depressing to me. But it is something that can’t be ignored. Humans have a long history of killing each other on a massive scale. If humanity is going to change how we act in the future, we can’t gloss over the past because it demonstrates human tendencies.

Besides his incredible insight, I appreciate Diamond for a number of other reasons. First off I find his writing reachable. Although he often talks about some very complex and specific things, he does a brilliant job of making it understandable to a layperson. He also pulls no punches; he seems to have a very realistic view of humanity, good and bad. He is quick to point out inconsistencies, discrimination and arrogance, including his own. He preaches without ever feeling preachy. He also has a fun sense of humor and appreciates irony as it regularly occurs in life.

I would be dumber and my life less full if I had not discovered Jared Diamond. And much to my joy he has a new book coming out in mere weeks!

Dr. Diamond’s first book for which he won nothing but the admiration of some pathetic, lifeless losers like yours truly. But he should have. It was excellent. True that Chimpanzee is the Salieri to Guns’ Mozart, but what it lacks in breadth it makes up in simplicity and erudition. I breezed through this book with nary a trip to Wikipedia unlike GGS, which sent me there virtually every day. And yet I still learned a ton.

The chapter titled “The Golden Age That Never Was” was a delightful decimation of the position that simpler times harbored some kind of environmental respect that we have since lost. It’s like he read Quinn’s manuscript for Ishmael (see) and wrote this in protest. Diamond points out that the Native New Worlders, far from respecting nature, precipitated the largest wave of extinction in human history. Just how respectful is it to walk up to a 500lb flightless bird that doesn’t run from you because it didn’t have the benefit of evolving to be afraid of humans and club it over the head? Or to kill a wooly mammoth, feast for 2 days and then leave the rest to rot?

About as respectful as trading Manhattan Island for some beads. At least now the species-killers get to keep our gambling money. What did the giant ground sloth get?

Jared Diamond has an amazing talent for connecting facts one after the other, leading to surprising insights. His books are full of things that make you go “Hmm.” In The Third Chimpanzee the reader will learn of humanity’s evolutionary past and the social and cultural adaptations that led to the modern world.

We start with a common ape-like ancestor from whom both humans and chimpanzees/bonobos diverged some 3,000,000 years ago, and progress through the various human ancestors until we arrive at homo sapiens. Spoken language precipitated what Diamond calls The Great Leap Forward, from which point mankind’s evolution would proceed along cultural rather than biological lines. We learn interesting facts about human reproduction, some of which are still not clearly understood, about things like why ovulation in human females produces no outward physical changes in their appearance, why they are fertile for only a few days each month, why sex is done in private, and why women experience menopause. Individually, these are just facts that we all know, but most of us never thought about linking them together into into a narrative that explains how biology and cultural selection reinforce one another. Remove any one of these characteristics and modern society would probably be very different.

Language is a remarkable subject, and, once again, Diamond provides interesting observations. For instance vervet monkeys have a small number of words for different kinds of threats. That these are truly words, not just vocalizations like prairie dogs make, is shown by the fact that they can use them to purposely deceive rival troops.

Diamond has some good observations about the transition of humans from hunter gatherers to pastoralists and farmers. The transition from a nomadic to a settled lifestyle was not necessarily a healthy choice. Archaeological evidence show that hunter gatherers worked less than farmers, were healthier, and lived a more egalitarian lifestyle. Yuval Noah Harari, in his recent book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, expands on this topic in greater detail and with more recent scholarship. For those with an interest in political history, according to Marx this is also the point in humanity’s past when things began to go wrong, when communities moved from what he theorized was primitive communism into the next stage of society: slavery (to be followed by feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and finally, communism again. Needless to say, it didn’t quite work out that way.)

The author makes a point about the domestication of plants that he would develop more fully in Guns, Germs, and Steel, and it is one of the key concepts that he would use to try to answer the question: why did science and technology develop in the West rather than somewhere else? Why did the Europeans sail to South America rather than the Aztecs sailing to and conquering Europe? One reason was that Europe and Asia found their dominant societies oriented on an east-west axis, while in South American it was north-south. The east-west one allowed plants to move easily across the continent, introducing better nourishment and leading to larger populations. North-south would require long and painstaking generations acclimatizing plants from cooler environments to equatorial heat, and back again to cooler climates in order for them to make it to the Northern Hemisphere. The accident of east-west geography granted European and Asian societies an advantage that none of the other cultures could overcome.

Finally, Diamond ends his book with a prescient look at humanity’s impact on the world. We have wiped out many many species and there is no reason to believe we will show greater caution in the future than we did in the past.

The book was published in 1991 based on earlier research, so, while it is still interesting and informative, science has moved on and some of what he says is out of date. With that in mind, however, this is an excellent book for someone looking for an understanding of human social, biological, and cultural evolution.

Hmmm. This one is a bit dated and he goes off on some not terribly impressive tangents. But also a lot of interesting stuff.

Here is an outline of the book:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...

And here is a great critical review
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...

Interesting look at where we have come from, and a powerful message of conservation for a society that needs to hear it. Slightly dated, but still a very good read for anyone interested in anthropology and biology

Diamond packs a lot of interesting information into this book & it flows well, but it's old (1992) so a lot of his information is outdated. Worse, his conclusions shouldn't be trusted. In several cases, I knew enough about the subject to catch him completely misunderstanding it & making his points based on cherry-picked data. That's bad science which he hides fairly well behind parts of conflicting views. Read this only for the interesting trivia (much of which is repetitive) but don't be swayed by his conclusions except perhaps in his actual fields which are geography & anthropology, I think.

Well narrated & interesting, but since I can't trust him, I can't give this a high mark. That's a shame. I'll put more comments after the various sections.

Table of Contents
Prologue
Diamond hit a sore spot with me almost immediately when he wrote "When Darwin intimated in 1859 that we had evolved from apes... I am so sick of reading & hearing that. Darwin never wrote or intimated any such thing! He wrote that we must have had a common ancestor. That's a huge difference & if someone doesn't understand it, everything that follows is drivel. Sigh. I know Diamond does, though. He gets on with the basic premise that we're actually just one of several hominid species & aren't as genetically distant from chimps as the white-eyed & red-eyed vireos are from each other. We share much with other mammals & what really makes us unique is our ability to communicate complex thoughts & our inventiveness.

Part 1 Just Another Species of Big Mammal
1 A Tale of Three Chimps
2 The Great Leap Forward

Diamond makes a great case for us just being another mammal from a biological perspective based on differences in DNA & early habits. He then shows how much we differ from other hominids including Neanderthals, but that also shows the age of this book. He sets an interesting lens to look through. He set my teeth on edge by using 'theory' rather than 'hypothesis'. If he's going to argue with science, he should be using the correct terms.

Part 2 An Animal with a Strange Life Cycle
3 The Evolution of Human Sexuality
4 The Science of Adultery
5 How We Pick Our Mates and Sex Partners
6 Sexual Selection, and the Origin of Human Races
7 Why Do We Grow Old and Die?

All really interesting, but I think he left out a lot to make his point. I'm not well enough informed to really pin down most of it. It just felt that way until I noticed that he was strictly arguing phenotypic evolution rather than the selfish gene theory. Again, lacking updated data like the genetic studies of Jews which was doing a wonderful job tracing their migrations until they cut off access when it was found that they, like the rest of us, have about a 15% adultery rate. Since they inherit through the paternal line, this was a big deal.

Part 3 Uniquely Human
8 Bridges to Human Language
9 Animal Origins of Art
10 Agriculture's Mixed Blessings
11 Why Do We Smoke, Drink, and Use Dangerous Drugs?
12 Alone in a Crowded Universe

Again, a lot of interesting stuff until the last chapter which was a train wreck. The only more idiotic treatment of the search for extraterrestrial life that I've ever heard has come from Young Earth Creationists & he barely cleared their low bar. For instance, he says we sent a message to another galaxy several decades ago & leaves the impression we should expect an answer. M13 is 21,000 light years away, so our message couldn't reach them until 23,000AD, but he never mentions that awkward fact. Instead, he tries to overwhelm the reality with a lot of other interesting facts, but all are very incomplete & twisted. The impression I've had that he's cherry-picking to make his points is confirmed. Yuck. He completely destroyed any remaining credibility he had.

Part 4 World Conquerors
13 The Last First Contacts
14 Accidental Conquerors
15 Horses, Hittites, and History
16 In Black and White

More about language than I would have expected, but I found it interesting. Much is a synopsis of his Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies which was great. He's quite pessimistic about us, even writing at one point something about 'modern nuclear warfare' leaving the impression we've dropped nuclear bombs fairly often while I'm shocked that only 2 have ever been deployed. That we made it through the Cold War & MAD days without one being being set off is incredibly hopeful, IMO.

The last chapter is primarily about genocide & he managed to bore me through sheer repetition of a handful of examples. There are plenty & he despairs of our race while not providing any actual numbers. We're changing fast & less people are dying from violence or most other causes but he's a pessimist. For instance, in 2012 (20 years after this book was published.) the total number of deaths worldwide were less than those in 1 battle of WWI.

Part 5 Reversing Our Progress Overnight
17 The Golden Age That Never Was
18 Blitzkrieg and Thanksgiving in the New World
19 The Second Cloud

He's right, we've never lived in harmony with nature when we had the power to take what we wanted. According to him, the first men on this continent wiped out almost all the large mammals & spread amazingly fast, but this book is 28 years old, so he's using 15,000-11,000 years ago for our invasion of the Americas. Lately I've read several articles that push that a lot earlier, probably at least twice as long ago which doesn't help his argument, although I haven't read a better one for the large mammal extermination. The same happened in Australia, too.

Epilogue: Nothing Learned, and Everything Forgotten?
Very pessimistic & he doesn't pay enough direct attention to economics. He writes We do not need novel, still-to-be invented technologies to solve our problems. We just need more governments to do many more of the same obvious things that some governments are already doing in some cases.

Again, I don't entirely agree. Energy makes the world go round & that means economics, too. A LOT of problems would be solved if we had something that produced portable, high power as the internal combustion engine does. Alternative energies are fine, but they're clunky & intermittent, so a better battery (Think Heinlein's Sun Stones.) would also help a lot. He also doesn't mention GMO crops to minimize climate change, invasive & ever adapting pests. Of course, this book was written before they became a big deal.

All in all, not a terrible read, but it was repetitive, old, & lacking depth in many areas. Very well narrated. I wouldn't bother reading it as there are many other books out there, but it's not a complete waste of time. Just don't drink his Kool Aid.

This is a wonderful book by a great author. In fact, I prefer this book to the other books that I've read by Jared Diamond. It is entertaining, informative, and every page is interesting. The book covers a vast range of topics, such as how are humans qualitatively different from other animals, why do men do stupid things to impress women, why do people practice adultery, why do humans practice genocide, how did languages evolve, why do some people become addicted to drugs, why do humans produce art, and why do humans age. The book ends with the ecological harm humans have done to the planet (not just recently, but in ancient times as well), and the extinctions of species that we cause. Diamond shows how none of these activities are unique to humans; each activity has some analog in animal behavior, as well.

Like Diamond's other books, there is plenty of speculation here. He makes sweeping generalizations that are not always held up by documented facts. But Diamond's enthusiasm rings loud and clear, and his speculations always sound reasonable, at least to me.

The Third Chimpanzee seemed to be a late addition to my book collection. I have read the other books by Diamond that elaborate on specific topics discussed previously in The Third Chimpanzee, and it is only now that I had the chance to finish the book.

I was reading this book on a short flight connecting Bangkok and Chiang Mai, when the Irish guy sitting next to me said to me, “Excuse me, but is that a book by Jared Diamond? I saw the name but I’m not sure about the title…” Thus began one of the strangest conversations in my life about the human race. He came from Ireland, ‘the only European nation that probably has never colonized other nations – well, because we were colonized…’ while I came from Indonesia, one of the cradles of the Homo genus and where Diamond did some of his research. I said to him though that I hadn’t yet finished reading The Third Chimpanzee, so I couldn’t give any opinion yet about the book. We forgot to exchange contact details, so I had no idea how to tell it to him now.

Well, I would tell him: this book is amazing!

Talking about the human race – the human species, to be biologically correct – is like walking on a mine field. One slip of a tongue, or one misunderstood line, and people may label you as a racist. But people like Diamond aren’t racist – they’re not here to tell us that whitemen are genetically more superior, thus able to stomp across the world and defeat other peoples, other cultures. They believe that by learning more about the human species, we can get to the roots of our hatred and misery and find more effective ways to stop us from destroying ourselves and Nature.

The Third Chimpanzee sets to find out what makes us unique, just as each species there ever was, is, and will be is unique; what makes us human. And on its way, it made me cry with its gripping tales of the crimes we have done to our fellow human beings – especially in the chapter about genocide. It also opened my eyes about the connection between agriculture and some of our miseries now. This book cut into my heart and cut it further into pieces, and reassembled it, even more determined than ever to get up and do something for fellow humans and Nature.

I was lucky I had found Diamond.