Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

parrot can say anything Albert Einstein could say, as well as mimicking the sounds of phones ringing, doors slamming and sirens wailing. Whatever advantage Einstein had over a parrot, it wasn’t vocal. What,

You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

The Stone Age should more accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used by ancient

hunter-gatherers were made of wood.