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Key insights from
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
By Yuval
Noah Harari
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What you’ll learn
Seventy thousand years ago, organisms from the species Homo
sapiens emerged on the scene. The study of their development and
activities is called history. In his ambitious study, Yuval Noah Harari
explains that human history has been propelled forward by three
revolutions: the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, and the
Scientific Revolution. Humans have shown their capacity for profoundly
impacting their environment, and each of the three revolutionary thresholds
that we have crossed increased this capacity. Humankind ignores its
powerful and often destructive tendencies at its own peril and the
planet’s, but there is still reason to hope for a better tomorrow. Time
will tell which path humanity will take.
Read on for key insights from Sapiens.
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1. Homo sapiens used to share the stage
with other species of human.
As human beings, we like to think of ourselves as set apart
from—and superior to—all other species of animal. This bias overlooks key
aspects of our development. Firstly, let us not forget we Homo sapiens
are animals, too. Homo sapiens literally means “Wise Man,” which
betrays some hubris. We are, however, part of the “great ape” family on the
taxonomy charts, making chimps and orangutans our cousins. Even closer than
cousins, consider also that our species’ particular genus (Homo)
housed at least six other species of humans for several millions of years,
all equipped with similar physical and mental capacities to our own. These
Homo species were in the middle of the food chain for hundreds of thousands
of years, sucking marrow out of the bones that lions and hyenas had left on
the African Savannah. Sapiens and our sibling species rose to the top of
the food chain as we learned to make tools and control fire, but our
physical bodies remained comparatively puny and unimpressive compared to
other apex predators.
All other Homo groups began going extinct tens of thousands
of years ago until only Sapiens remained. What happened to our sibling
species like Neanderthals and Denisovans? How did Sapiens outlast the
others? The answer is language.
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2. Capacity for language and imagination
made Sapiens dominant.
Evidence suggests that 100,000 years ago, the larger,
sturdier Neanderthal groups faired well in altercations with Sapiens.
70,000 years ago, however, Sapiens became increasingly dominant. Over the
next 40,000 years, they began to invent, engage in trade, develop social
hierarchies, and show religious inclinations. Perhaps the most important
development was their unique ability to communicate. Whether DNA or other
factors are responsible for the emergence of this unique language, its
consequences are of greater interest than its origins, as this was the
decisive factor that began Sapien’s road to ascendancy, a period known as
the Cognitive Revolution.
Many animals communicate, sometimes in complex ways. Animals
can only communicate in terms of what is real, about a tree full of fruit
or a warning about a nearby tiger. Humans, however, can work with an
infinite combination of sounds to convey particular meaning. This enables
us to communicate information to and about one another—gossip, in other
words.
Though often frowned upon, gossip is actually a very useful
mechanism for preserving group cohesion and cooperation. Gossip is
sufficient to provide cohesion in a tribe of fewer than 150 people, but
cities and civilizations require something more: they need fictions,
made-up stories that create guiding codes of values and expected norms.
Examples of powerful fictions include the modern state, the Catholic
Church, the UN, and human rights. Unlike bees and ants, which cooperate in
large numbers, but very inflexibly, humans have a language that is
flexible, which makes human behavior more versatile. With the Cognitive
Revolution, cultural evolution allowed humans to adapt to environments
without waiting for their DNA to catch up. The myth-making ability made us
dominant.
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3. The Agricultural Revolution is the
grandest hoax in human history.
Some historians have cast the Agricultural Revolution that
began 12,000 years ago in a positive light. The painful truth is that this
revolution is history’s biggest fraud.
Wheat is the culprit here. It used to be a common grass,
left to grow wild. Today, wheat fields cover almost 900,000 square miles of
the earth’s surface—that’s ten Great Britains! What probably began as
seasonal squats to save the time and energy that nomadism required ended as
year-round settlements. Ironically, the more concerted that farming efforts
became, the more time was required to tend to the crops. Farming ended up
being an energy-sucker instead of an energy saver.
Sapiens tried to colonize wheat, but in effect, wheat
had colonized Sapiens. They were bound to a plot of land, worked long
hours, and usually subsisted on a diet of one crop. This revolution brought
some short-term benefits, but the trade-offs made the wheat bargain a raw
deal that humanity could not go back on. Even if they had realized the
price for domesticating plants like wheat, corn, and rice, they knew
nothing else. They were too far removed from their ancestors’ keen
hunter-gather instincts. Additionally, with the resultant population
boom—which added violence and disease to the mix— hunting and foraging was
out of the question, as resources were too scarce.
The corollary to the domestication of plants was the
domestication of animals. It began around the same time as farming did.
Animals were used for food, farming, and clothing. On the whole, treatment
of domesticated animals has grown increasingly inhumane since the Agricultural
Revolution. Today there are one billion pigs, one billion cows, and 25
billion chickens, many living under cruel conditions.
From an evolutionary standpoint, the Agricultural Revolution
was a great boon for wheat and hogs, rice and chickens, but for most
animals—including Sapiens—the tradeoff is individual suffering on a grand
scale.
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4. History is a story of the gradual
unification of economies, civilizations, and faiths.
If we look at history’s trajectory from a bird’s-eye view,
we see that, despite moments of fragmentation and collapse, history is
moving toward unity with remarkable speed. Around 10,000 BC, there were
thousands of relatively isolated “worlds.” By 2,000 BC, there were
hundreds. By about 1500 AD, about ninety percent of the world’s population
lived in the massive Afro-Asian world; the other ten percent—Mesoamerican
World, Andean World, Australian World, and Oceanic World—were gradually
gobbled up in imperial pursuits over the centuries that followed, drawing
the outliers into the economic, political, and religious spheres of the
mega-world. To speak of the world as a whole, to talk about global events,
is a recent phenomenon in human history. It is now common to think of the
Sapiens species in its entirety rather than isolated, warring tribes. The
primary drivers of unification have been money, the growth of expansive
empires, and religion. The vision of global unification began around 1,000
BC, and the trends in that direction are evident in economic, political,
and religious developments.
Within the hunter-gatherer tribal structure, favors,
obligations, and small-scale bartering would have been the currency of the
day. This was likely the case even as the Agricultural Revolution gathered
steam. As populations grew, villages became towns and cities and networks
developed between those hubs. The systems of favors, obligations, and
bargaining were no longer sustainable. Money was useful because it enabled
people to assess the value of numerous goods and services quickly, it made
exchange easier, and it was far easier to store than goods like barley and
livestock.
Money is yet another mental construct that humans have
invented, and it is arguably the most successful one in human history.
People from every nation have bought into it, which gives the myth its
power. We may not trust strangers, approve of a regime’s political
policies, or like a region’s religious practices, but we all trust in
money. Thus, money has played a significant role in the trend toward global
unification.
On the political front, empires served to move the world
swiftly toward unity. Empires are comprised of numerous people groups, and,
through that the norms that the rulers instantiate in their realms, empires
digest particular cultural practices and traditions. Empires homogenize
large, diverse groups.
It is likely that there will be a single, unifying political
order that will develop in the interest of safeguarding the rights of not
just Americans or Japanese or Nigerians, but all human beings.
Nationalistic rhetoric is receding. Global public opinion, an international
court system, and interdependent global market structures are significant
steps in that direction. What is more, with problems of global proportion
like climate change, it is likely that the global empire will fly a green
flag.
Religion is the third major global unifier. Hierarchies are
imagined constructs, and thus, susceptible to challenge and overturning.
Religion has been used to legitimize myths and put them beyond human reach
by giving them supernatural mystique.
For a religion to be a world unifier, it must be considered
universally true for all people, and it must be missionary in its
philosophy. The largest religions with these world-unifying
qualities—Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam—did not emerge until the first
millennium BC. Each borrows ideas and rituals from animistic, dualist,
monotheistic, and polytheistic practice. Syncretism could very well be the
way toward a single universal world religion.
Add to the mix the worship of Man, which has emerged over
the past 300 years. Followers of modern religions like liberal humanism,
socialist humanism, and evolutionary humanism each obey and organize
according to supreme commandments: respectively, promoting human freedom,
promoting equality, and promoting humanity’s evolution into a superhuman
and protecting the race from devolving into subhumans.
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5. The Scientific Revolution has brought
discovery, a spirit of optimism, and a hunger for progress.
The most dramatic shifts in human history have occurred
within the last 500 years. In 1500 AD, there were half a billion
humans—their gross production totaled $250 billion, and they consumed
thirteen trillion calories per day. Today, there are over seven billion
humans—the value of annual human production comes out to $60 trillion, and
we consume over 1,500 trillion calories daily. With all the momentous changes,
the most defining was the first successful atom bomb detonation in 1945. It
signaled humankind’s capacity to not just alter life dramatically, but to
end it.
The Scientific Revolution was fueled by the discovery of
ignorance. As far as the premodern was concerned, everything worth knowing
was contained in sacred texts, so there was no need to ask questions that
the religious texts had not answered. Curiosity about the natural world and
the universe drove the quest for knowledge. The open admission of uncertainty
has made modern science the most dynamic tradition in history.
Science’s ignorance revolution fostered a spirit of optimism
and hunger for progress. Francis Bacon believed that the future can be
better than the present and that scientific discoveries can give us the
power to alter the world for the better. Hunger, poverty, and even death
are the result of technical problems that simply require the right
technical solutions. Infant mortality and life expectancy rates have
dramatically improved; so it could be that Death itself is approaching
Death’s door. The Gilgamesh Project is an example of an organization
actively seeking to achieve immortality. While traumatic accidents can
always be life-ending, the aim is to eliminate all other causes of death.
This, of course, depends on political and economic backing,
and science will always require a guiding ideology to push research
projects forward. Pure science does not exist. Scientific research has and
remains intimately intertwined with the economics of capitalism and
politics of empires.
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6. Capitalism has led to booming business,
but not without oppression.
If we conceive of science and imperialism as twin engines,
capital was the fuel that propelled the military-industrial-scientific
complex. Modern economic history is a story of explosive growth. Throughout
most of human history, even through the Agricultural Revolution, capitalism
could not have thrived because people were risk-averse. This is
understandable: if a baker has no money, he cannot hire a contractor to
build a shop and oven, which means he cannot bake or sell bread, which
means he cannot make money. You need capital to get started. An injection
of credit thawed the frozen cycle.
The optimism that the Scientific Revolution ushered in was
critical. A growing trust in the future led to the appearance of credit.
Even if a person would not see an immediate return, he would lend money if
he thought the enterprise might be successful. The entrepreneur could pay
the contractor to build the bakery and pay back the lender with the
bakery’s profits over time.
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations points out a
principle that we now take for granted: profit surpluses can be used to
hire more workers to produce more products which leads to even more profits.
This system works as long as business owners continue to reinvest their
capital; however, an increasing proportion of capital is put to
superfluous, non-productive ends. This necessitates some form of regulation
to ensure more equitable distribution. Free market economies may increase
the size of the pie, but many subsist on a shrinking sliver of that pie.
Moreover, the clearest example of unfettered free market greed—and, sadly,
far from the only—was the transatlantic slave trade. It was not racism, but
the rat race that fueled such a cruel market.
The capitalist reply is that, like it or not, we cannot live
without a capitalist system now, and it is far better than the Marxist
alternative. This is true. The second rebuttal is that, while capitalism cannot
deliver on equitable distribution of goods, a time of relative prosperity
for all is likely just around the corner. This could be the case, too.
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7. For the first time in history, supply
is outpacing demand.
Production requires energy and raw materials. The most
significant discovery in the history of energy conversion was turning heat
into energy. It began with the steam engine in Britain’s mineshafts around
1700. The combustion engine and electricity were other critical
discoveries. Such developments fueled the Industrial Revolution, which
could also be considered the Second Agricultural Revolution. Farm equipment
became larger and mechanized, requiring only a handful of people to be
farmers instead of an entire peasant class. In today’s United States, only
two percent of the population provides produce for the entire country and
exports massive surpluses.
With increasingly efficient means of production, supply is
outpacing demand for the first time in history. For the system to function,
people have to keep buying. Consumerism is the powerful new myth that grew
up with the Industrial Revolution. It has reversed the ethic of frugality
as virtue and luxury as vice. Self-restraint is now seen as oppressive. The
consumerist-capitalist ethic is easy to live up to because the self is
served by obeying the supreme command to buy more.
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8. The Industrial Revolution has created a
pattern of continuous radical change.
The growing fires of industry and population explosion have
many worried that we are in danger of using up our resources. This fear is
overplayed. Between increasingly efficient ways of using resources and
discoveries of alternative sources of energy, we have reason to be
optimistic about the future. The sun and literal oceans of potential energy
are available for harnessing.
The Industrial Revolution has led to numerous upheavals that
have reshaped basic patterns in society. The rise of youth culture, urbanization,
the transformation of peasantry and urban proletariat, the decline of
patriarchy, and democratization are all significant changes. Probably the
most notable shift is the disintegration of the community and family bonds
and the state’s and market’s move to fill the emotional void. Courts settle
family feuds, police forces curb violence, nursing homes can house the
elderly instead of families, and public schools teach social and
nationalistic values. These all serve as “imagined communities” that state
and market have developed to compensate for a fraying social fabric.
Individualism is the doctrine that progressively loosened family ties. With
an emphasis on the value of the individual, decisions are being based
increasingly on individual preference rather than on the needs of the
community or nuclear or extended family. Today’s tribes tend to be based
upon consumer preferences: sports, veganism, and musicians, for instance.
The malleability of society makes the modern era about as
easy to describe as a chameleon’s colors. Generations of cultural and
family traditions have been diluted or lost in the rapid shuffle. Even the
most conservative politicians market themselves as agents of change.
Despite headlines of terrorism and tribal flare-ups, we are currently
enjoying one of the most peaceful eras of history. Oppenheimer deserves the
Nobel Peace Prize to rule them all for his development of the atom bomb.
Mutually assured destruction has been the best insurance against warfare
and invasions. Violence levels are low and imperialists have withdrawn in a
fairly peaceable manner. Choosing peace has become the shrewdest course for
most polities. Time will tell if this is short-lived or an unprecedented
enduring peace.
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9. We are becoming powerful, aimless gods
on Earth.
Intelligent design is true, though not as the Creationists
present it: in the twenty-first century we are no longer bound by the
random, impersonal forces of natural selection, but can modify organisms
and create them with new features.
There are three potential directions that intelligent design
could take. One course is the creation of superhumans. We could genetically
improve not only life expectancy and immune systems but intelligence,
emotion—even virtue. What is more, we could even bring back extinct
species. Scientists from several countries have mapped the entire mammoth
genome and are ready to infuse that genetic material into elephant embryos.
Just a few years ago, a Brazilian bio-artist created a florescent green
rabbit by infusing DNA from a glowing jellyfish into a rabbit embryo.
Another potential route we could take is cyborg technology,
which blends organic and inorganic elements. People already have glasses,
cell phones, hearing aids, and prosthetic limbs. It is likely that these
technologies will become increasingly integrated into human bodies.
Yet another direction intelligent design could go is
artificial intelligence. What if we created a technology that had the
ability to adapt and reproduce itself independently?
This is not Brave New World or Jurassic Park: these are real
scenarios that scientific advancements and technology have made possible.
The only constraints will be ethical and political. This is understandable,
as developments will have implications not only for social orders but also
for human identity itself. Humankind has become increasingly powerful, but
also discontented and directionless.
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Endnotes
Who do you picture
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These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Sapiens here. And since we get a commission on
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