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Biologists classify organisms into species. Animals are said to belong to the same species if they tend to mate with each other, giving birth to fertile offspring.
Species that evolved from a common ancestor are bunched together under the heading ‘genus’ (plural genera). Lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars are different species within the genus Panthera.
Homo sapiens – the species sapiens (wise) of the genus Homo (man).
Genera in their turn are grouped into families, such as the cats (lions, cheetahs, house cats),
All members of a family trace their lineage back to a founding ma...
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Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our nearest living relatives include chimpanzees,
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.
‘Sapiens’ to denote members of the species Homo sapiens, while reserving the term ‘human’ to refer to all members of the genus Homo.
Mammals weighing 130 pounds have an average brain size of 12 cubic inches. The earliest men and women, 2.5 million years ago, had brains of about 36 cubic inches. Modern Sapiens sport a brain averaging 73–85 cubic inches. Neanderthal brains were even bigger.
Why are giant brains so rare in the animal kingdom? The fact is that a jumbo brain is a jumbo drain on the body.
Another singular human trait is that we walk upright on two legs.
We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages.
enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures.
One of the most common uses of early stone tools was to crack open bones in order to get to the marrow.
Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle.
only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain.
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
By about 300,000 years ago, Homo erectus, Neanderthals and the forefathers of Homo sapiens were using fire on a daily basis.
humans may even have started deliberately to torch their neighbourhoods. A carefully managed fire could turn impassable barren thickets into prime grasslands teeming with game.
But the best thing fire did was cook. Foods that humans cannot digest in their natural forms – such as wheat, rice and potatoes – became staples of our diet thanks to cooking.
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.
Some scholars believe there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal tract, and the growth of the human brain.
The last remains of Homo soloensis are dated to about 50,000 years ago. Homo denisova disappeared shortly thereafter. Neanderthals made their exit roughly 30,000 years ago. The last dwarf-like humans vanished from Flores Island about 12,000 years ago.
About 100,000 years ago, some Sapiens groups migrated north to the Levant, which was Neanderthal territory, but failed to secure a firm footing. It
beginning about 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens started doing very special things. Around that date Sapiens bands left Africa for a second time. This time they drove the Neanderthals and all other human species not only from the Middle East, but from the face of the earth.
from about 70,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago witnessed the invention of boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows and needles (essential for sewing warm clothing). The first objects that can reliably be called art date from this era (see the Stadel lion-man),
The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution.
What, then, is so special about our language? The most common answer is that our language is amazingly supple.
second theory agrees that our unique language evolved as a means of sharing information about the world.
Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.
gossip theory might sound like a joke, but numerous studies support it. Even today the vast majority of human communication – whether in the form of emails, phone calls or newspaper columns – is gossip.
Gossip usually focuses on wrongdoings. Rumour-mongers are the original fourth estate, journalists who inform society about and thus protect it from cheats and freeloaders.
only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.
This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.
You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.
fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively.
How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.
none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.
such companies have become the main players in the economic arena, and we have grown so used to them that we forget they exist only in our imagination. In the US, the technical term for a limited liability company is a ‘corporation’, which is ironic, because the term derives from ‘corpus’ (‘body’ in Latin) – the one thing these corporations lack. Despite their having no real bodies, the American legal system treats corporations as legal persons, as if they were flesh-and-blood human beings.
story, if a Catholic priest dressed in his sacred garments solemnly said the right words at the right moment, mundane bread and wine turned into God’s flesh and blood. The priest exclaimed ‘Hoc est corpus meum!’ (Latin for ‘This is my body!’) and hocus pocus – the bread turned into Christ’s flesh.
a certified lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals, wrote all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixed his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then hocus pocus – a new company was incorporated.
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?
The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions’, ‘social constructs’, or ‘imagined realities’. An imagined reality is not a lie. I lie when I say that there is a lion near the river when I know perfectly well that there is no lion there. There is nothing special about lies. Green monkeys and chimpanzees can lie.
Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.
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.
today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.
As long as Homo erectus did not undergo further genetic alterations, its stone tools remained roughly the same – for close to 2 million years! In contrast, ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have been able to change their behaviour quickly,
For nearly the entire history of our species, Sapiens lived as foragers.
foragers had very few artefacts to begin with, and these played a comparatively modest role in their lives.
There’s hardly an activity, a belief, or even an emotion that is not mediated by objects of our own devising.
