Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Homo rudolfensis (East Africa); Homo erectus (East Asia); and Homo neanderthalensis (Europe and western Asia).

On the island of Java, in Indonesia, lived Homo soloensis, ‘Man from the Solo Valley’, who was suited to life in the tropics. On

and the money paid out in fees. Yet 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.

How exactly did Armand Peugeot, the man,

create Peugeot, the company? In much the same way that priests and sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history, and in which thousands of French curés were still creating Christ’s body every Sunday in the parish churches.

Telling effective stories is not easy. The

difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much

An imagined reality is not a lie.

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 real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation.

Biology sets the basic parameters for the behaviour and capacities of Homo sapiens. The whole of history takes place within the bounds of this biological arena. b. However, this arena is extraordinarily large, allowing Sapiens to play an astounding variety of games. Thanks to their ability to invent fiction, Sapiens create more and more complex games, which each generation develops and elaborates even further. c. Consequently, in order to understand how Sapiens behave, we must describe the historical evolution of their actions. Referring only to our biological

constraints would be like a radio sportscaster who, attending the World Cup football championship, offers his listeners a detailed description of the playing field rather than an account of what the players are doing.

Foragers moved house every month, every week, and sometimes even every day, toting whatever they had on their backs. There were no moving companies, wagons or even pack animals to share the burden. They consequently had to make do with only the most essential possessions.

It’s much the same dilemma that a future historian would face if he had to depict the social world of twenty-first-century teenagers solely on the basis of their surviving snail mail – since no records will remain of their phone conversations, emails, blogs and text messages.

distance from East Africa to China would

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.

Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution.

Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic permanent settlements – ideal hotbeds for disease. Foragers roamed the land in small bands that could not sustain epidemics.

an entire forager band was massacred at Ofnet.

exhibited a wide array of religions and social structures, so, too, did they probably demonstrate a variety of violence rates. While

Religion and violencd

slowly and in a restricted geographical area. Wheat and

BC the main wave of domestication was over. Even

This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

Why would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of the Homo sapiens genome? Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution was a trap. The Luxury Trap The rise of farming was a very gradual affair spread over centuries and millennia.

How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per

family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad.

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted.

Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted.

A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying water buckets under a scorching sun.

It’s very plausible. History is full of far more idiotic miscalculations.

Maybe Sapiens had other aspirations, and were consciously willing to make their lives harder in order to achieve them.

We have enough documents,

letters and memoirs to prove that the Second World War was not caused by food shortages or demographic pressures. But we have no documents from the Natufian culture, so when dealing with ancient periods the materialist school reigns supreme. It is difficult to prove that preliterate people were motivated by faith rather than economic necessity.

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

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