Sapiens: A brief history of humankind

Originally published: 2011

Author: Yuval Noah Harari

Page count: 443

Genre: Non-fiction

 Why I picked up this book…because it had an intriguing title and was in Sunday Times Bestsellers list! (Btw I bought it second hand). But I must say that it was a great choice. This book takes you on a journey of evolution of mankind from ‘an animal of no significance’ to ‘the animal that became God’. In the year 1500 there were around 500 million sapiens and the total value of goods and services produced by humankind was around $250 billion, now there are more than 7 billion sapiens producing goods and services worth $60 trillion. How we as a species become so successful?

 With a length of 443 pages divided into 20 chapters, different parts of this book will appeal to various categories of people who like history, genetics, biology, anthropology, economics and science history. It will be immensely appealing to people who are generally curious. So, let us start…

 Three significant revolutions have shaped the course of history. This book is divided in four parts, three of them focusing on those revolutions and fourth on unification of humankind.

 Part 1 – Cognitive Revolution

The book begins with Big Bang and events such as formation of solar system and planets. It quickly moves on to humans and their evolution from a species of apes called Australopithecus around 2.5 million years ago. The major difference between other animals and humans is the size of brain. Humans have a significantly larger brain/body ratio as compared to other animals. This large brain equipped humans to make tools, learn about their surroundings and develop social structures. But it also resulted in loss of muscular power (most of the energy was diverted from muscles to brain) and humans had to spend a lot of time in search of food (larger brains demanded high quantities of energy). Humans enjoyed a big brain for nearly 2 million years but they remained weak and subsisting on plants and small animals. Humans also moved away from their cradle in Africa to many different parts of the world and evolved into many species such as Homo Neanderthalensis, Homo Erectus, Homo Soloensis etc. One of those species was Homo Sapiens – the “wise man”. There is no chronological order in which these species inhabited earth and they may have co-existed in many parts of the world.

 After nearly 2 million years of meek existence, one of the first important steps for humans to become the rulers of the world was domestication of fire. Domestication of fire was the first factor that differentiated humans from other animals. The period from 70000 and 30000 years ago marked a huge progress for Homo Sapiens. They invented boats, oil lamps, bows & arrows, needles, second migration from Africa, settled in Eurasia, Australia and other parts of the world and drove other human species to extinction (Homo Sapiens obliterated all other human species existing in the world such as Neanderthals, Soloensis etc.). This happened because sapiens developed new ways of thinking and communicating. Their language evolved as a way of gossiping.

 Hunter-gatherer societies were small bands of people moving around in search of food. They fed themselves in an elastic and opportunistic pattern. Their diet was comprised of a wide variety of fruits, roots, fungi, insects, grains and meat. Also, there was no concept of family/ property/ marriage/ monogamy. Language evolved through gossip which was a way to share information within bands.

 The true unique feature of this language from language of other animals was the ability to speak about fictions. Fiction empowered sapiens to imagine things collectively, create myths, stories and religions. This ability to create myths and stories out of words eventually enabled large number of strangers to cooperate effectively. It also gave Sapiens the ability to revise its behavior rapidly according to the changing needs. This opened the highway of cultural revolution bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution.

 Part 2 -Agricultural Revolution

Around 10000 years ago, something drastic happened in the lives of sapiens – the agricultural revolution. It began with wheat and goats in the hilly areas of Turkey, western Iran and Levant and slowly spread across the world. By 3500 BC the main wave of domestication was over. Even today, with highly advanced technologies, more than 90% of calories that sapiens eat come from handful of plants that their ancestors domesticated.

 But agricultural revolution is termed by the author as “History’s biggest fraud” with humankind. Instead of sapiens domesticating these handful of plants, they domesticated sapiens. They were hunter-gatherers who knew the secrets of nature and roamed about the planet in bands with a rich, varied diet. Hunter-gatherers never thought too much about future. If there was a lot of food available, they stayed at a place. In case of less availability of food or calamity they simply moved. These domesticated plants tied us to a piece of land, working on those pieces of land for days on end for harvest. Their bodies were also not evolved for these tasks on fields as they were for climbing trees and hunting gazelles. This brought a plethora of illnesses. Also, these crops did not give any economic security and farmers were prone to floods, drought, violent attacks and theft. They did not provide a variety of nutrients. So why did sapiens continue with it? Because it did provide something, not to an individual sapiens but to homo sapiens as a species. It provided more food per unit of territory which enabled them to multiply exponentially. The currency of evolution is copies of DNA and agricultural evolution gave us just that; the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. Same was the case with domesticated animals. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueler with passing centuries. The discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is the most important lesson we can draw from agricultural revolution.

 For millions of years, hunter-forager humans lived in small bands. Agricultural revolution led to a lot of people staying together on a piece of land. More crops meant more population and vice versa. This huge population made human imagination to create astounding networks of mass cooperation, such as cities and kingdoms. In these kingdoms there were farmers who produced crops, warrior class that protected farmers and their produce from thieves and violent attacks and other classes such as priests and traders.

This kingdom was an imaginary order which divided people into different sects based on their work. Sapiens believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables them to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.

 Now there is a fundamental problem with imagined order. Its not like a natural order which is always true (like Law of Gravity which is universally true). An imagined order can survive only if a large percentage of population accepts it. So how do you make a large population believe in that order? First you never admit that the order is imagined. Second you insist that it is created by law of Gods of by laws of nature. Third you indoctrinate people from the moment they are born. We are a part of so many imaginary orders. For example, nations, religions, concept of individualism, money etc. There is no way out of imagined order.

A lot of conscious effort has to made to maintain the imagined order of any city or kingdom. For that, empires generated huge amounts of information such as details of crops produced, taxes and duties collected, state expenditure etc. Human brain was not capable to stored that huge quantity of information. This resulted in advent of writing/ scripts. Early stage writing was limited to facts & figures. Scripts have gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. Free association & holistic thought have given way to compartmentalization & bureaucracy.

 In hunter-gatherer societies each band member knew every other member. Human brain is also evolved to remember only hundred and fifty people who are close to you. But in cities and kingdoms it was a problem as everyone did not know everyone. Thus, hierarchies came into picture. Hierarchies served an important function. They enabled complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting time and energy needed to become personally acquainted. Slowly, the hierarchies became highly ingrained in the society and a part of social status. Slowly, people from different social hierarchies were discouraged to interact/ marry. This discouragement happened in many ways and one of them was to term these classes as a source of pollution. People usually try to remain away from potential disease carriers. And this led to isolation and oppression of these vulnerable classes across the world. Many hierarchies were prevalent in many parts of the world but one which was prevalent everywhere was hierarchy of gender where men have always got the better deal.

 Part 3 – Unification of mankind

If we adopt a view-point of cosmic spy satellite which scans millennia we can see that history is relentlessly moving toward unity. We have transitioned from small bands roaming the earth to a global connected family. The factors that led to this unification were as follows:

Creation of Money: For thousands of years, sapiens believed in favors and obligations. But as kingdoms came into existence and number of strangers increased, it became difficult to deal in favors. Barter was possible but the number of products were limited and determining exact value of every product was also difficult (How many oranges would you exchange for a pair of pants?). Thus, money came into existence. It was based on principles of universal convertibility and universal trust. And eventually it became apogee of human tolerance. Money does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation and is the only trust system created by human that can bridge any cultural gap.

Imperialism: Cultural diversity and territorial flexibility make imperialist empires different from other forms of states. Because of these characteristics, empires managed to unite diverse ethnic groups and ecological zones under a single political umbrella, thereby mingling together larger and larger segments of humans together (E.g. British Empire in nineteenth and twentieth century).

Religion: Religion can be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order. Religion evolved from animism to polytheism and then to monotheism, with three of them coexisting at many places in the world. Monotheism tended to be far more fanatical and missionary and over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition and spreading across the world, thus uniting humankind under the umbrella of that particular religion.

 Part 4 – The Scientific Revolution

We all know about industrial revolution, discovery of single celled species and other breakthroughs in the areas of science. But the defining moment came on 16 July 1945 when first atomic bomb was detonated at Alamogordo. The historical process that led to this point in history is termed as scientific revolution. Pre-modern rulers gave money to priests and scholars to preserve the existing knowledge. Since last five centuries, rulers and governments are giving money to scientists, researchers and universities to not only preserve existing knowledge but to come up with new discoveries and inventions. Modern science differs from all traditional knowledge in three ways:

1. It assumes that we do not know everything

2. After admitting ignorance it aims to acquire new knowledge through observation and mathematics

3. It uses this new knowledge to create new technologies

But science needs more than just research to make progress. It depends on mutual reinforcement of science, politics and economics. This is called the scientific revolution’s feedback loop. This feedback loop between science, empire and capital has been history’s chief engine for past 500 years. We have seen the role of empires (whose ultimate aim is to expand) in this revolution. The only word which we need to understand the role of capital in this loop is “Growth”. Modern economy has been growing since a long time. What has resulted in this growth? Trust and human imagination. Trust in a flourishing future and imagination of money in banking system that allows to loan $10 for every dollar present with the bank. These two things give rise to the idea of credit which brought real economic growth, growth strengthened the trust in future and opened way for more credit. This fueled industrial revolution which led to urbanization, disappearance of peasantry, rise of industrial proletariat, democratization and disintegration of patriarchy. This also led to a major social revolution which is replacement of family and community structures by state and market. They exist only in our collective imagination and yet their power is immense. The revolutions of last two centuries have been so swift that they have changed the characteristic of social order. We are living in the most peaceful times in entire history and yet are troubled. With the individual having unprecedented power to decide her own path in life, we find it even hard to make commitments. We live in an increasingly lonely world of unraveling communities and families. But the most important finding of all is that happiness does not necessarily depend on only objective conditions but on a correlation of objective conditions and subjective reality. Thus, if you want a bicycle and get one you are happy. But if you want a Ferrari and get an Audi you will be unhappy. If you have a Why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is terrible no matter how comfortable it is.

Despite doing astonishing things, we remain unsure of our goals. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power.