At a large airport, people might mingle, join queues and follow instructions peacefully, and it’s most likely that they won’t know anyone else around. In traditional societies, those kinds of interactions would be impossible, as strangers often represent danger.

In this amazing book, Jared Diamond examines how traditional societies differ from ours and what we may learn from each other. Political states with laws and rulers and bureaucracies have only existed for a relatively short time, and indeed it’s only recently that there have not been examples of traditional societies on the planet.

In New Guinea and parts of South America ‘first contact’ was as recent as the 1930s and there are fairly reliable accounts of how these societies were organised. Diamond does not romanticise these communities. They were often much more violent than our own, not in terms of the numbers slain or wounded but in terms of the percentages of the populations that were. In addition, intertribal conflicts were protracted affairs that could go on for years and often involved all generations and sexes. Infanticide was common, especially in hunter-gatherer societies where mothers were unable to nurse a second child if they were still nursing and carrying their previous child.

State justice too is often better in some respects than traditional justice as it codifies and objectifies a crime or misdemeanour, but traditional societies have a form of restorative justice that can lead to better outcomes for victims and perpetrators. In child rearing there are some practices that we have lost that we may like to reconsider. In traditional societies young children are continuously held and other adults have constant and active contact with the group’s children. Diamond’s examples of differences between our WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic) societies and traditional ones are fascinating. What does it tell us? Well, it’s up to us to decide.

Mark Rubbo is Readings’ managing director