Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

The Persian Empire – a universal political order ‘for the benefit of all humans’.

Inspiring. But certainly as murderous a regime as most totalitarian systems.

Buddhism in India – a universal truth ‘to liberate all beings from suffering’.

Not to be confused with “Buddhism” the organized religion :) Siddharta wanted nothing to do with dogma, he only reached the technique (!) of Vipassana, which is universal and non-sectarian. Do yourself a favor, like Yuval and so many others, and see what the Buddha actually found out (dhamma.org is a good start).

The Scientific Revolution. Humankind admits its ignorance and begins to acquire unprecedented power.

About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.

Horses and donkeys have a recent common ancestor and share many physical traits. But they show little sexual interest in one another. They will mate if induced to do so – but their offspring, called mules, are sterile.

Biologists label organisms with a two-part Latin name, genus followed by species. Lions, for example, are called Panthera leo,

everyone reading this book is a Homo sapiens – the species sapiens (wise) of the genus Homo (man).

Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

An upright gait required narrower hips, constricting the birth canal – and this just when babies’ heads were getting bigger and bigger. Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females. Women who gave birth earlier, when the infant’s brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children. Natural selection consequently favoured earlier births. And, indeed, compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely, when many of their vital systems are still under-developed.

It takes a tribe to raise a human.

since humans are born underdeveloped, they can be educated and socialised to a far greater extent than any other animal.

Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom.

One of the most common uses of early stone tools was to crack open bones in order to get to the marrow. Some researchers believe this was our original niche.

Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.

Whereas chimpanzees spend five hours a day chewing raw food, a single hour suffices for people eating cooked food.

The advent of cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food, to devote less time to eating, and to make do with smaller teeth and shorter intestines.

150,000 years ago, East Africa was populated by Sapiens that looked just like us.

4 per cent of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA.

In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species?

Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart? Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.

The period from about 70,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago witnessed the invention of boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows and needles

The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution.

Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.

the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all.

Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution.

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

myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

Just as human politicians on election campaigns go around shaking hands and kissing babies, so aspirants to the top position in a chimpanzee group spend much time hugging, back-slapping and kissing baby chimps.

a typical chimpanzee troop consists of about twenty to fifty individuals.

one case of ‘genocidal’ activity in which one troop systematically slaughtered most members of a neighbouring band.2

gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable

A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred soldiers can function well on the basis of intimate relations, with a minimum of formal discipline.

once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way. You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon.

Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

Stadel Cave.

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies?

as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.

charlatans,

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality.

while the behaviour patterns of archaic humans remained fixed for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens could transform their social structures, the nature of their interpersonal relations, their economic activities and a host of other behaviours within a decade or two.

Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers,

One on one, even ten on ten, we are embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees. Significant differences begin to appear only when we cross the threshold of 150 individuals, and when we reach 1,000–2,000 individuals, the differences are astounding.

all of the band’s adults cooperated in parenting its children. Since no man knew definitively which of the children were his, men showed equal concern for all youngsters.

A good mother will make a point of having sex with several different men, especially when she is pregnant, so that her child will enjoy the qualities (and paternal care) not merely of the best hunter, but also of the best storyteller, the strongest warrior and the most considerate lover.

The proponents of this ‘ancient commune’ theory argue that the frequent infidelities that characterise modern marriages, and the high rates of divorce, not to mention the cornucopia of psychological complexes from which both children and adults suffer, all result from forcing humans to live in nuclear families and monogamous relationships that are incompatible with our biological software.1

We hardly notice how ubiquitous our stuff is until we have to move it to a new house.

pension funds and labour markets should readjust to a world in which sixty might be the new thirty.

Throughout history, the upper classes always claimed to be smarter, stronger and generally better than the underclass. They were usually deluding themselves.

We may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world – me, you, men, women, love and hate – will become irrelevant. Anything happening beyond that point is meaningless to us.

If the curtain is indeed about to drop on Sapiens history, we members of one of its final generations should devote some time to answering one last question: what do we want to become?