“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari
Looking at our past, heading into the future.
I was intrigued about this book after hearing some of my work colleagues speak highly about it and its author. While reading it, I took it with me to a few medical appointments in which people I didn't know either made a comment on how good it is or asked me, "is it as good as I've heard it is?".
Truth be told - I found it to be a very good book. It's not a light or easy read though; it's one of those that you really need to commit to. It includes an astonishing amount of information, but it's written with such a conversational storytelling that it keeps you interested throughout its 450+ pages.
Well, keeping in mind that Sapiens covers humankind's history across 2.5 million years, maybe 450 pages isn’t that long. What the author did is divide the content into four parts, spanning from when humans first appeared in Africa over two million years ago to the present, when natural selection is being challenged by intelligent design.
Sapiens is about the history of humankind but, different to a history book or an encyclopedia, in it the author provides us with comments and his points of view, and not only the historical facts. By dividing humankind's history into 3 key periods (which he calls "revolutions"), Harari walks the reader through its evolution and how we evolved from being many isolated and separate human worlds to becoming a single global world with a wide variety of lifestyles.
If asked to describe this book in one word, I would certainly say "thought-provoking". In addition to the wealth of historical facts he includes, by providing his own insight and thoughts the author gives readers the opportunity to either agree or disagree with him. It's a book that really gets you thinking, and as you read it you may find that some comments may be aligned to what you think, and others may not - which I found to make the book more engaging.
The evolution of humans
The book begins by explaining who we Sapiens are. Homo sapiens has been the only human species in our planet for the last 10,000 years. However, for many thousands of years before that, we shared our world with other human species, such as Homo neanderthalensis, Homo soloensis and Homo erectus. What happened to them, and why is Homo sapiens the only one that survived? That is where the first of the "revolutions" suggested by Harari comes into play.
The three revolutions
Spanning from 70,000 years ago to this day, the author suggests that Homo sapiens has gone through these three revolutions:
Cognitive revolution: starting between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, during this period new ways of communicating and thinking appeared among Homo sapiens. It was about 70,000 years ago when Sapiens started expanding from Africa to other geographies, driving other human species away from the lands they inhabited - and eventually disappearing. During this period, human beings survived by being hunter-gatherers and lived as forager societies that moved from one place to another frequently. According to the author, it was during this period when religions, myths and gods appeared for the first time, as Sapiens are able to speak about or believe in entities that can be a product of collective imagination or whose existence cannot be proven using our senses.
Agricultural revolution: about 12,000 years ago, Sapiens transitioned from gathering plants and hunting animals to harvesting and taming them respectively. This transition to agriculture also drove humans to establish themselves in permanent settlements, instead of moving from place to place. This happened on several regions of our planet, where Sapiens harvested and farmed the species that were available in each one. This is the period during which writing and methods of processing and storing mathematical data appeared, and when human groups began organizing themselves into hierarchies.
Scientific revolution: for the last 500 years, humankind has had an extraordinary growth in many areas, such as population, production, technology, and energy consumption. It has also made great strides in learning more about the world we live in - for example, through space travel and the discovery of microorganisms. Scientific research has allowed humans to expand our knowledge, and so getting funding for it and investing in it has become key to achieve goals in different areas - e.g., politics, economy, medicine and even religion. This is the period in which imperialism, and the quest for knowledge and new territories led to the appearance of capitalism.
A matter of perspective
The book covers many topics related to humankind, and important periods and events that humans have gone through their history - there is culture, religion, economics, science, social order, and even a full chapter on happiness. While reading it you may find topics that you already knew about but may have been in the back of your mind for some time (at times it reminded me of my elementary and high school days), and others that may be new to you or you hadn’t reflected upon them before. There are several topics that caught my attention and were very interesting to me - such as the differences between the human species that existed millions of years ago, the origin of money, the expansion of the empires, and how humans started sharing and living in a global world.
In addition to the large amount of information that Sapiens includes, to me a big value of this book is that its storytelling is provocative - whether you agree or not, it gets you thinking (there were indeed moments in which I agreed with the author and others in which I didn't). It is even humourous at times. It is about humankind's history from the author's perspective - looking to understand who we are, why we are the way we are, and spark the question of what the future will be like.
If you're looking for a non-fiction read that you'll be able to pick up regularly, this is a very interesting and engaging one. Why am I adding the caveat of picking it up regularly? It is only because there is so much information on it, that if you don’t read it on a regular basis, you might have to go back a few pages to remember details of where you left off each time. Oh - and would I recommend it to the people who asked me about it while I was carrying it around? I would certainly do.
non-fiction - bestseller - humankind - yuval noah harari - history