Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Where wheat became particularly abundant, and game and other food sources were also plentiful, human bands could gradually give up their nomadic lifestyle and settle down in seasonal and even permanent camps.

The foragers became farmers.

In most agricultural societies at least one out of every three children died before reaching twenty.5 Yet the increase in births still outpaced the increase in deaths; humans kept having larger numbers of children.

The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC.

People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions.

If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan.

feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases.

by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought.

it took generations for the small changes to accumulate and transform society and, by then, nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently.

The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today.

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.

We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.

The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted.

the foragers thought it worth a huge amount of effort and time. The only way to build Göbekli Tepe was for thousands of foragers belonging to different bands and tribes to cooperate over an extended period of time. Only a sophisticated religious or ideological system could sustain such efforts.

It may well be that foragers switched from gathering wild wheat to intense wheat cultivation, not to increase their normal food supply,

but rather to support the building and running of a temple.

The most aggressive and unruly lambs were first to the slaughter. The most submissive, most appealing lambs were allowed to live longer and procreate. The result was a herd of domesticated and submissive sheep.

In order for humans to turn bulls, horses, donkeys and camels into obedient draught animals, their natural instincts and social ties had to be broken, their aggression and sexuality contained, and their freedom of movement curtailed.

When an ox could no longer pull the plough, it was slaughtered. (Note the hunched position of the Egyptian farmer who, much like the ox, spent his life in hard labour oppressive to his body, his mind and his social relationships.)

Cows, goats and sheep produce milk only after giving birth to calves, kids and lambs, and only as long as the youngsters are suckling. To continue a supply of animal milk, a farmer needs to have calves, kids or lambs for suckling, but must prevent them from monopolising the milk. One common method throughout history was to simply slaughter the calves and kids shortly after birth, milk the mother for all she was worth, and then get her pregnant again.

she is almost constantly pregnant, and is fertilised within 60 to 120 days after giving birth in order to preserve maximum milk production.

Some shepherd tribes used to kill the offspring, eat its flesh, and then stuff the skin. The stuffed offspring was then presented to the mother so that its presence would encourage her milk production.

cattle represent one of the most successful animal species ever to exist. At the same time, they are some of the most miserable animals on the planet.

A rare wild rhinoceros on the brink of extinction is probably more satisfied than a calf who spends its short life inside a tiny box, fattened to produce juicy steaks.

This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.

THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION IS ONE

This was the turning point, they say, where Sapiens cast off its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted towards greed and alienation.

Concern about the future was rooted not only in seasonal cycles of production, but also in the fundamental uncertainty of agriculture.

Peasants were worried about the future not just because they had more cause for worry, but also because they could do something about it. They could clear another field, dig another irrigation canal, sow more crops. The anxious peasant was as frenetic and hardworking as a harvester ant in the summer, sweating to plant olive trees whose oil would be pressed by his children and grandchildren, putting off until the winter or the following year the eating of the food he craved today.

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

The mere fact that one can feed a thousand people in the same town or a million people in the same kingdom does not guarantee that they can agree how to divide the land and water, how to settle disputes and conflicts, and how to act in times of drought or war.

The problem at the root of such calamities is that humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals.

The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.

Mass cooperation still hasnt evolved

Code of Hammurabi. This was a collection of laws and judicial decisions whose aim was to present Hammurabi as a role model of a just king, serve as a basis for a more uniform legal system across the Babylonian Empire, and teach future generations what justice is and how a just king acts. Future

silver).

Even during the ancient humans there have been those who have and those who dont. Slavery existed during ancietn babylonians. There have always been power divides

The American Declaration of Independence asserts that: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

the American founding document promises that if humans act according to its sacred principles, millions of them would be able to cooperate effectively, living safely and peacefully in a just and prosperous society.

These principles have no objective validity.

The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation.

The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However,

Evolution is based on difference, not on equality.

Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything.

‘Endowed by their creator’ should be translated simply into ‘born’.

there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities and characteristics. Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, but because they have wings.

So ‘unalienable rights’ should be translated into ‘mutable characteristics’.

Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty too is a political ideal rather than a biological phenomenon.

So here is that line from the American Declaration of Independence translated into biological terms: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.

Imagined orders

are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.

Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’.