Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.

You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer.

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.

Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths – by telling different stories. Under the right circumstances myths can change rapidly.

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.

Before the Agricultural Revolution, the human population of the entire planet was smaller than that of today’s Cairo.

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.2

wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth.