Video Description: Most people turn to friends, parents and sometimes even experts in the medical field for advice on parenting. Not Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond – he prefers to take notes on best ways to rear a child from tribal communities. And, that’s not the only type of lesson they can teach us. In his most recent book, “The World Until Yesterday,” Diamond draws on five decades of his own fieldwork in New Guinea to write about potential answers to several universal human problems. Diamond discusses how traditional societies handle caring for the elderly, healthier diets and what he calls “constructive paranoia.”

• Provide the video for students doing research for an independent project in sociology and/or anthropology. What insights do they gain that they can use in their presentation/report?
• Use the video in a flipped learning activity and have students come to class prepared to share two insights gained by watching the video and two questions they’d like answered through their own or class research.