In his Review of our book Questioning Collapse (Nature 463, 880–881; 2010), Jared Diamond alleges that it contains factual errors, which he uses to justify his devaluation of our emphasis on human resilience. In doing so, he shores up what we contend are his simplistic theses regarding societal 'collapse'. Given that our book critically examines two of Diamond's works — Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed — we are surprised that Nature published this review without printing a fuller disclosure of the author's position in relation to our book.

We consider that there are errors in Diamond's review to which we wish to respond briefly. First, Niels Lynnerup, author of The Greenland Norse: A Biological-Anthropological Study (Meddelelser om Grønland, Man and Society, 1998), reiterated in a recent phone conversation with us that he knows of no evidence of starvation of the Greenland Norse. Second, as Chaco Canyon in New Mexico has never been sited in lush coniferous forest but in dry, scrub vegetation, wood for buildings was always imported from increasingly further away as nearby forests became exhausted. The search for wood was not the reason for Chaco's abandonment. Third, David Cahill's chapter shows that when Spaniards came to Peru, the Inka were engaged in a civil war as well as imperial expansion. Consequently, the Inka had many local enemies, some of whom allied with the Spaniards against the Inka. Fourth, Christopher Taylor's description of the culture and history of the Rwandan genocide refutes Diamond's 'Malthusian explanation' for this tragedy. And finally, we believe, based on considerable evidence, that the man named Yali whom Diamond declares to have met in Papua New Guinea and the Yali discussed by Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington are the same person. Neither Diamond nor anyone else has produced evidence that would lead us to question this.

The point of Questioning Collapse is that everyone didn't “end up dead” in cases of 'collapse', but that many survived and some flourished under changed political and cultural circumstances. The conflation of profound societal change with the notion of biological extinction is a persistent error that runs through much 'collapse' scholarship. We believe that our book presents ample archaeological and historical data that contextualize how societies moved through periods of crisis. Our book is more than a critical evaluation of Diamond's views: it is about how we understand change in the past, how we grapple with the legacy of colonialism and with inequalities in the present, and how we can move forward productively and resiliently into the future.