Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Yuval holds a PhD from the University of Oxford. He is a professor at the Department of History in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
This is an amazing book about the history of humans that should be in every K12 school. The topics he is documenting is certainly stunning. In fact, Yuval is addressing the entire evolution of human kind.
At first glance anyone would not consider that an entire history of anthropology, geography, psychology, religion, ideologies, and even how sapiens will evolve with robotic parts. This is a compliment to Yuval’s efforts.
In fact, by retracing human history, some key lessons emerge regarding historical folklore. On example is both chimps and sapiens can only organize into groups at a maximum of 150. So, humans have long believed in many myths that have ultimately sidelined the truth.
By documenting sapien migrations from eastern Asia moving into Alaska, Yuval obviously reveals movement south through Canada and down the west coast of America into Mexico culminating into South America’s southern tip roughly 150,000 years ago.
I was certainly impressed in Harari’s research regarding the historical agricultural revolution. He addresses the question why agriculture became important. In fact, some of his writing indicates Agricultre has failed the world’ population:
Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globes surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?
pg. 169
It was not food shortages that caused most of history’s wars and revolutions. The French Revolution was spearheaded by affluent lawyers, not by famished peasants. The Roman Republic reached the height of its power in the first century BC, when treasure fleets from throughout the Mediterranean enriched the Romans beyond their ancestors’ wildest dreams. Yet it was at that moment of maximum affluence that the Roman political order collapsed into a series of deadly civil wars. Yugoslavia in 1991 had more than enough resources to feed all its inhabitants, and still disintegrated into a terrible bloodbath.
pg. 212
The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.
pg. 213
When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links.
pg 214
Perhaps Chapter 12: The Law of Religion is certainly worth a deeper look at historical confrontations between major religions throughout history:
These theological disputes turned so violent that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the hundreds of thousands. On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors)
pg. 435
Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.1 In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.
pg. 439
Yuval closes this book by obviously focusing how technology will ultimately change sapiens. The amount of engineering of humasn today is certainly pushing past the stage we cannot reverse. So, is all this technological progress for the better?
There is much to consider, review and reflect
In conclusion, I wish that my middle school education would have been taught from Yuval’s book.