Book Review: Sapiens – A Brief history of Humankind

I much enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens. It is a brilliant, thought-provoking odyssey through human history with its huge confident brush strokes painting enormous scenarios across time. It is massively engaging and continuously interesting. The book covers a mind-boggling 13.5 Billion years of pre-history and history.

From the outset, Harari seeks to establish the multifold forces that made Homo (‘Man’) into Homo sapiens (‘Wise Man’) exploring the impact of a large brain, tool use, complex social structures and more. He brings the picture up to date by drawing conclusions from mapping the Neanderthal genome, which he thinks indicates that Sapiens did not merge with Neanderthals but pretty much wiped them out.

Throughout Sapiens, there’s a persistent theme about how humans continue to allow their luxuries to become necessities. Wheat farming was beneficial for sedentary lifestyles — but after humans established sedentary lifestyles, they had no choice but to continue farming, else return to their nomad days. In this manner, wheat farming, which was meant to be an advantage, became a necessity for Homo sapiens, since they no longer wanted to return to their older lifestyle.

Similarly, writing allowed humans to store ideas and thoughts outside of their brains. This is greatly helpful to pass information from generation to generation and to record financial transactions. However, as writing’s popularity grew, it not only became a necessity for all transactions and information storage, but it also has actually changed the way Homo sapiens think. A similar effect occurs today in the Google Era, where we no longer remember information snippets, instead of remembering where to obtain the information.

Sapiens doesn’t read like a textbook. It entices the readers from the first page and flows well, connecting lots of information in an interesting way. The book is split into four different sections, starting with the Cognitive Revolution. We were not always the only humans roaming the Earth. In fact, our singularity is unique. Sapiens encourages the reader to rethink our conceptions about humanity and tends to take a more objective scientific approach, focusing on our development as animals rather than some ‘high being.’ Harari addresses different theories of why we survived while our other fellow Homo family members didn’t. The book does a good job of explaining the “fictions” that people create in order to work together and create a functioning, forever evolving society.

The second part of the book is focused on the Agricultural Revolution and takes a different tone I’ve read before when it comes to the positive or negative impact of humanity’s move to farming. In fact, Harari thinks its history’s “biggest fraud.” He makes the argument that while the agricultural revolution was good for our species in the sense that we “created more copies of our DNA,” but bad in terms of quality of life and human suffering. It also contributed to the suffering of animals and the deterioration of entire ecosystems.

This section also talks about the rise of the elite and the development of writing and mathematics. But the most interesting part of this section was chapter eight when Harari writes about the different “fictions’ in our society that organize us as well as the reality that “human rights” aren’t exactly what we think they are. A lot of this section is devoted to talking about the concept of “purity” in different cultures and how humans use it to segment themselves from other groups. He also delves into the subject of sex and gender, exploring the possibilities as to why many societies have developed into patriarchies. This section is a lot less about the events that took place during the Agricultural revolution and more about the reasons different societies developed the way that they did through different lenses like race, sex, and social status.

Section three is called the Unification of Humankind and focuses primarily on the growing unity between parts of the globe. Harari questions the modern political order, asking How American politics can both support the individual and equality? And how do you believe in one God and also a dualistic Devil? Most of the section is focused on addressing the different ways in which humanity has used our cognitive dissonance and duelling cultural values in order to move forward and the different major forces that have unified the globe in the modern era. The most interesting parts of this section had to do with the creation of money and the development of religion and ideology. I also thought that his argument as to why different ideologies such as communism are religions was fascinating and that he does an excellent job of explaining the different kinds of Humanisms.

Part four evaluates the world in terms of money, imperialism, capitalism, and modern science. So much of this book is focused on the importance of environmentalism and encourages the reader to think about their place in our ecological environment on this Earth and not just as a part of humanity. He also asks the reader to evaluate the last 200 years of history and the oddity of our exponential growth compared to the rest of our history. The reframing of the Industrial Revolution as a drastic change in the structure of our communities and families is well done. His view of the modern age feels optimistic, pointing out that while sometimes things feel bleak, humanity is also much less violent and connected to global interests than ever before.

Sapiens is different than a traditional history book in the way that it seeks to explain history through the lens of different significant ideologies and concepts rather than events. It asks why things happened in relation to various forces and questions them thoroughly rather than merely saying that they happened.