Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.

The ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively.

ever since the Cognitive Revolution Homo sapiens has been able to revise its behaviour rapidly in accordance with changing needs. This opened a fast lane of cultural evolution, bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution.

There’s hardly an activity, a belief, or even an emotion that is not mediated by objects of our own devising.

Thanks to the appearance of fiction, even people with the same genetic make-up who lived under similar ecological conditions were able to create very different imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms and values.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.

Experts disagree about the exact date, but we have incontrovertible evidence of domesticated dogs from about 15,000 years ago.

Even if in times of crisis the tribe acted as one, and even if the tribe periodically gathered to hunt, fight or feast together, most people still spent most of their time in a small band.

The average person might live many months without seeing or hearing a human from outside of her own band, and she encountered throughout her life no more than a few thousand humans.

Fishing villages might have appeared on the coasts of Indonesian islands as early as 45,000 years ago.

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.

It would be a mistake, however, to idealise the lives of these ancients.

Scholars tend to ask only those questions that they can reasonably expect to answer.

Their first achievement was the colonisation of Australia some 45,000 years ago. Experts are hard-pressed to explain this feat.

The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history,

The moment the first hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that Homo sapiens climbed to the top rung in the food chain and became the deadliest species ever in the four-billion-year history of life on Earth.

As they pushed on, they encountered a strange universe of unknown creatures that included a 450-pound, six-foot kangaroo, and a marsupial lion, as massive as a modern tiger, that was the continent’s largest predator. Koalas far too big to be cuddly and cute rustled in the trees and flightless birds twice the size of ostriches sprinted on the plains. Dragon-like lizards and snakes seven feet long slithered through the undergrowth. The giant diprotodon, a two-and-a-half-ton wombat, roamed the forests.

Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished.

The Maoris, New Zealand’s first Sapiens colonisers, reached the islands about 800 years ago.

Faced with an alien and threatening environment, it seems that they deliberately burned vast areas of impassable thickets and dense forests to create open grasslands, which attracted more easily hunted game, and were better suited to their needs. They thereby completely changed the ecology of large parts of Australia within a few short millennia.

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest

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

This can hardly be a coincidence. It’s likely that the cultural centre of Göbekli Tepe was somehow connected to the initial domestication of wheat by humankind and of humankind by wheat.

Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness.

In many modern dairy farms a milk cow usually lives for about five years before being slaughtered. During these five years she is almost constantly pregnant, and is fertilised within 60 to 120 days after giving birth in order to preserve maximum milk production. Her calves are separated from her shortly after birth. The females are reared to become the next generation of dairy cows, whereas the males are handed over to the care of the meat

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

It was not food shortages that caused most of history’s wars and revolutions.

The Babylonian king most famous today was Hammurabi.

There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals.

The imagined order is embedded in the material world.

The imagined order shapes our desires.

People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism.

Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can.

The imagined order is inter-subjective.

For the imagined order is not a subjective order existing in my own imagination – it is rather an inter-subjective order, existing in the shared imagination of thousands and millions of people.

The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals.

Inventing such methods proved to be far more difficult than inventing writing. Many writing systems developed independently in cultures distant in time and place from each other. Every decade archaeologists discover another few forgotten scripts. Some of them might prove to be even older than the Sumerian scratches in clay. But most of them remain curiosities because those who invented them failed to invent efficient ways of cataloguing and retrieving data.

This partial script was composed of ten signs, representing the numbers from 0 to 9. Confusingly, these signs are known as Arabic numerals even though they were first invented by the Hindus (even more confusingly, modern Arabs use a set of digits that look quite different from Western ones). But the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, understood its usefulness, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe.

Entire fields of knowledge, such as physics and engineering, have already lost almost all touch with the spoken human language, and are maintained solely by mathematical script.

In truth, our concepts ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology.

there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and social power among humans.

Though bonobo females are weaker on average than the males, the females often gang up to beat males who overstep their limits.

How did it happen that in the one species whose success depends above all on cooperation, individuals who are supposedly less cooperative (men) control individuals who are supposedly more cooperative (women)?

These dramatic changes are precisely what makes the history of gender so bewildering. If, as is being demonstrated today so clearly, the patriarchal system has been based on unfounded myths rather than on biological facts, what accounts for the universality and stability of this system?

Cultures are constantly trying to reconcile these contradictions, and this process fuels change.

Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both social equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction.

cognitive dissonance.

We would do better to adopt instead the viewpoint of a cosmic spy satellite, which scans millennia rather than centuries. From such a vantage point it becomes crystal clear that history is moving relentlessly towards unity. The sectioning of Christianity and the collapse of the Mongol Empire are just speed bumps on history’s highway.

when an Aztec wanted to buy something, he generally paid in cocoa beans or bolts of cloth.

Everyone always wants money because everyone else also always wants money, which means you can exchange money for whatever you want or need.