In my last blog post reviewing The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, I mentioned that I wanted to review two books that I had read during the research for my recently submitted epistemology paper. While the first one was directly related to that topic, this second book was just one that I have regularly received a lot of questions about and I absolutely had to read and digest. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by the historian Yuval Noah Harari was first published in English in 2014 and was soon a worldwide smash hit. Sapiens was on the NY Times bestseller list for 182 weeks and has been translated into 65 different languages. And it is exactly aligned with the motto on the top of every page of this website: “Contemplating the past. Choosing the destination.” The scholarly reception of Sapiens was not very positive (to say the least!), and I wasn’t really ready to contribute anything substantial to that when Sapiens first came out. But after 400+ blog posts, I have a lot more research behind me now so it’s finally time.
First off, Sapiens is almost 500 pages long and it really does deserve a close reading. There is no way I can cover all of that in one blog post, but luckily (for all of us) the book is divided into four parts, plus a brief afterward:
Part One: The Cognitive Revolution
Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
Part Three: The Unification of Humankind
Part Four: The Scientific Revolution
Afterword: The Animal that Became a God
The first three parts are just 4 or 5 chapters each, so they will fit nicely into separate blog posts. The final part, however, is comprised of 7 chapters, and I took by far the most notes there. So, I’m going to split that part of Sapiens into two posts where I think there is actually a nice natural break in between two of the chapters. I’ll explain more about that when I get there. For now, I’ll follow my standard review procedure of noting important quotes (in this case from the 2014 eBook) and then reacting to them along the way. Here goes!
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Part One: The Cognitive Revolution
Chapter 1 An Animal of No Significance
This first chapter is a very quick introduction for Homo sapiens to take the stage. The timeline of events is good to know. And it’s great to conceive of humans existing as a minor part of nature for so many millennia. The “political dynamite” for differences in the genes of different races of people, however, should really only be a concern for naïve racists. The world really needs to better understand the role that culture plays in our gene-culture coevolution. So, the fact that a few percentages of other hominids are in the genes this or that people (or the fact that “As much as 17% of the Denisovan genome from Denisova Cave represents DNA from the local Neanderthal population”) is actually of minor importance compared to the differences within groups and the differences of cultural and environmental influences. Tracing hominid DNA is an important tool for understanding the history of hominid settlements, but it should have no bearing on current social policies. I wish Harari had said more about that rather than just throwing some “dynamite” onto the stage and leaving it open for speculation.
I also think his claim that humans are unlike other “majestic top predators” and are “banana-republic dictators”, “full of fears and anxieties”, because our dominance came too quickly is highly speculative and most likely wrong. When I examined the logical appraisals behind the beliefs that cause our emotions, I found that anxiety came from not knowing what the future will hold. Due to epistemic limitations, this will be the case for any minds that can look into the far future. If “majestic” lions or orcas ever developed the cognitive abilities to make plans for decades into the future, I am quite sure they would develop anxieties about that future too.
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Chapter 2 The Tree of Knowledge
For more on the development of language and cooperation during this time in human history, I highly recommend Robin Dunbar’s Human Evolution. Harari grazes the surface of this topic just fine, but then he goes a bit off the deep end with his theme about fictions and myth-making. These are of huge importance to Harari, as two later articles in the New York Timesmade clear to me. (See the op-ed by Harari in May 2019: “Why Fiction Trumps Truth”, and the interview in November 2021: “Yuval Noah Harari Believes This Simple Story Can Save the Planet”.) But there is a huge category error here! Harari says “our modern institutions” will “function on exactly the same basis” as “believing in ghosts and spirits”. This is nonsense. Ghosts and spirits have no actual effect on the world because they do not exist, whereas modern institutions have huge real-world effects because they are built from very real humans agreeing to very real cooperative actions. I like the point that Harari made about our “ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all”. This is exactly aligned with the fact that the highest tier in my hierarchy of consciousness is for “abstraction”. But these abstractions aren’t only for imaginary inventions. They can also be cognitive labels for categories of things and actions that are very real. Tribes, nations, virtue, and vice are all examples of this that are wholly different from gods and goblins. Abstractions are indeed vital to the way human minds work. And these can change must faster than genetic changes. But all abstractions are not the same. And insisting that they are will only make it harder to replace myths that have no evidence for them. Good leaders and change agents are not “powerful sorcerers”. They have just contemplated the past more deeply in order to better choose the destination.
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Chapter 3 A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve
I thought this was an excellent chapter, pointing out all the holes in our knowledge about hunter-gatherer societies as well as noting the diversity that is seen in what we do know. It is an excellent rebuttal to the “paleo” people who have greatly oversimplified the lives of our ancestors.
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Chapter 4 The Flood
And this chapter was chock full of examples where large populations of non-human animals were wiped out over and over, around the world, wherever Sapiens showed up. It should give pause to anyone championing “indigenous wisdom” as something that is worth more than wisdom earned the rational way. Just to be clear, it is absolutely wise to learn from indigenous ways. But then that is just modern, scientific, rational wisdom when we glean the best ideas from as many sources as possible. As Jonathan Rauch put it in Kindly Inquisitors, no one gets final say, and no one has personal authority over knowledge. Don’t listen to anyone claiming otherwise.
So, that will do it for this first installment of reviewing Sapiens. I have a lot going on in my personal life at the moment so I plan to release the rest of these reviews every couple of weeks. In the meantime, let me know if you’ve read Sapiens and what your impressions of it were. Or, maybe consider buying the book and reading it along with me so you can see if I missed anything and then take the chance to share your own thoughts. I look forward to hearing from you!
First off, Sapiens is almost 500 pages long and it really does deserve a close reading. There is no way I can cover all of that in one blog post, but luckily (for all of us) the book is divided into four parts, plus a brief afterward:
Part One: The Cognitive Revolution
Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution
Part Three: The Unification of Humankind
Part Four: The Scientific Revolution
Afterword: The Animal that Became a God
The first three parts are just 4 or 5 chapters each, so they will fit nicely into separate blog posts. The final part, however, is comprised of 7 chapters, and I took by far the most notes there. So, I’m going to split that part of Sapiens into two posts where I think there is actually a nice natural break in between two of the chapters. I’ll explain more about that when I get there. For now, I’ll follow my standard review procedure of noting important quotes (in this case from the 2014 eBook) and then reacting to them along the way. Here goes!
-------------------------
Part One: The Cognitive Revolution
Chapter 1 An Animal of No Significance
- (p.3) About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history. Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different. This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms.
- (p. 5) Our nearest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.
- (p. 8) from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species.
- (p. 9) Humans have extraordinarily large brains compared to other animals. Mammals weighing sixty kilograms have an average brain size of 200 cubic centimeters. The earliest men and women, 2.5 million years ago, had brains of about 600 cubic centimeters. Modern Sapiens sport a brain averaging 1,200–1,400 cubic centimeters. Neanderthal brains were even bigger.
- (p. 11) We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities, and complex social structures are huge advantages. It seems self-evident that these have made humankind the most powerful animal on earth. But humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures.
- (p. 12) Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana-republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.
- (p. 17) If the Replacement Theory is correct, all living humans have roughly the same genetic baggage, and racial distinctions among them are negligible. But if the Interbreeding Theory is right, there might well be genetic differences between Africans, Europeans, and Asians that go back hundreds of thousands of years. This is political dynamite, which could provide material for explosive racial theories.
- (p. 17) It turned out that 1–4 percent of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA. That’s not a huge amount, but it’s significant. A second shock came several months later, when DNA extracted from the fossilized finger from Denisova was mapped. The results proved that up to 6 percent of the unique human DNA of modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan DNA.
- (pp. 20-21) What was the Sapiens’ secret of success? How did we manage to settle so rapidly in so many distant and ecologically different habitats? How did we push all other human species into oblivion? Why couldn’t even the strong, brainy, cold-proof Neanderthals survive our onslaught? The debate continues to rage. The most likely answer is the very thing that makes the debate possible: Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language.
This first chapter is a very quick introduction for Homo sapiens to take the stage. The timeline of events is good to know. And it’s great to conceive of humans existing as a minor part of nature for so many millennia. The “political dynamite” for differences in the genes of different races of people, however, should really only be a concern for naïve racists. The world really needs to better understand the role that culture plays in our gene-culture coevolution. So, the fact that a few percentages of other hominids are in the genes this or that people (or the fact that “As much as 17% of the Denisovan genome from Denisova Cave represents DNA from the local Neanderthal population”) is actually of minor importance compared to the differences within groups and the differences of cultural and environmental influences. Tracing hominid DNA is an important tool for understanding the history of hominid settlements, but it should have no bearing on current social policies. I wish Harari had said more about that rather than just throwing some “dynamite” onto the stage and leaving it open for speculation.
I also think his claim that humans are unlike other “majestic top predators” and are “banana-republic dictators”, “full of fears and anxieties”, because our dominance came too quickly is highly speculative and most likely wrong. When I examined the logical appraisals behind the beliefs that cause our emotions, I found that anxiety came from not knowing what the future will hold. Due to epistemic limitations, this will be the case for any minds that can look into the far future. If “majestic” lions or orcas ever developed the cognitive abilities to make plans for decades into the future, I am quite sure they would develop anxieties about that future too.
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Chapter 2 The Tree of Knowledge
- (p. 23) The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We’re not sure.
- (p. 27) Most likely, both the gossip theory and the there-is-a-lion-near-the-river theory are valid. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched, or smelled.
- (p. 27) fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths … Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.
- (p. 30) Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees. Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. People easily acknowledge that ‘primitive tribes’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers.
- (p. 36) The ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively. But it also did something more. Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths – by telling different stories.
- (p. 37) ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have been able to change their behavior quickly, transmitting new behaviors to future generations without any need of genetic or environmental change.
- (p. 38) This was the key to Sapiens’ success. In a one-on-one brawl, a Neanderthal would probably have beaten a Sapiens. But in a conflict of hundreds, Neanderthals wouldn’t stand a chance. Neanderthals could share information about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably could not tell – and revise – stories about tribal spirits. Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behavior to rapidly changing challenges.
- (pp. 41-2) Once cultures appeared, they never ceased to change and develop, and these unstoppable alterations are what we call ‘history’. The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology. Until the Cognitive Revolution, the doings of all human species belonged to the realm of biology, or, if you so prefer, prehistory.
- (p. 44) The next chapter takes a peek behind the curtain of the ages, examining what life was like in the millennia separating the Cognitive Revolution from the Agricultural Revolution.
For more on the development of language and cooperation during this time in human history, I highly recommend Robin Dunbar’s Human Evolution. Harari grazes the surface of this topic just fine, but then he goes a bit off the deep end with his theme about fictions and myth-making. These are of huge importance to Harari, as two later articles in the New York Timesmade clear to me. (See the op-ed by Harari in May 2019: “Why Fiction Trumps Truth”, and the interview in November 2021: “Yuval Noah Harari Believes This Simple Story Can Save the Planet”.) But there is a huge category error here! Harari says “our modern institutions” will “function on exactly the same basis” as “believing in ghosts and spirits”. This is nonsense. Ghosts and spirits have no actual effect on the world because they do not exist, whereas modern institutions have huge real-world effects because they are built from very real humans agreeing to very real cooperative actions. I like the point that Harari made about our “ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all”. This is exactly aligned with the fact that the highest tier in my hierarchy of consciousness is for “abstraction”. But these abstractions aren’t only for imaginary inventions. They can also be cognitive labels for categories of things and actions that are very real. Tribes, nations, virtue, and vice are all examples of this that are wholly different from gods and goblins. Abstractions are indeed vital to the way human minds work. And these can change must faster than genetic changes. But all abstractions are not the same. And insisting that they are will only make it harder to replace myths that have no evidence for them. Good leaders and change agents are not “powerful sorcerers”. They have just contemplated the past more deeply in order to better choose the destination.
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Chapter 3 A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve
- (p. 45) The flourishing field of evolutionary psychology argues that many of our present-day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this long pre-agricultural era.
- (p. 47) we need to learn something about the living conditions of our ancestors, to examine how Sapiens lived between the Cognitive Revolution of 70,000 years ago, and the start of the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago. Unfortunately, there are few certainties regarding the lives of our forager ancestors.
- (p. 49) all forager societies that have survived into the modern era have been influenced by neighboring agricultural and industrial societies.
- (p. 49) modern forager societies have survived mainly in areas with difficult climatic conditions and inhospitable terrain, ill-suited for agriculture.
- (p. 49) the most notable characteristic of hunter-gatherer societies is how different they are one from the other.
- (p. 51) The heated debates about Homo sapiens’ ‘natural way of life’ miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.
- (p. 56) The hunter-gatherer way of life differed significantly from region to region and from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, laborers, and office clerks who followed in their footsteps.
- (p. 58) The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies’.
- (p. 62) Any attempt to describe the specifics of archaic spirituality is highly speculative, as there is next to no evidence to go by and the little evidence we have – a handful of artefacts and cave paintings – can be interpreted in myriad ways.
- (p. 68) Just as foragers exhibited a wide array of religions and social structures, so, too, did they probably demonstrate a variety of violence rates.
I thought this was an excellent chapter, pointing out all the holes in our knowledge about hunter-gatherer societies as well as noting the diversity that is seen in what we do know. It is an excellent rebuttal to the “paleo” people who have greatly oversimplified the lives of our ancestors.
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Chapter 4 The Flood
- (p. 82) Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions.
And this chapter was chock full of examples where large populations of non-human animals were wiped out over and over, around the world, wherever Sapiens showed up. It should give pause to anyone championing “indigenous wisdom” as something that is worth more than wisdom earned the rational way. Just to be clear, it is absolutely wise to learn from indigenous ways. But then that is just modern, scientific, rational wisdom when we glean the best ideas from as many sources as possible. As Jonathan Rauch put it in Kindly Inquisitors, no one gets final say, and no one has personal authority over knowledge. Don’t listen to anyone claiming otherwise.
So, that will do it for this first installment of reviewing Sapiens. I have a lot going on in my personal life at the moment so I plan to release the rest of these reviews every couple of weeks. In the meantime, let me know if you’ve read Sapiens and what your impressions of it were. Or, maybe consider buying the book and reading it along with me so you can see if I missed anything and then take the chance to share your own thoughts. I look forward to hearing from you!
