Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

The question

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, trained at Oxford in medieval military history. Sapiens grew from an introductory course on world history that he taught, and it was published in Hebrew in 2011 and in English in 2014. It became one of the best-selling non-fiction books of the century, translated into dozens of languages.

Its question is the largest a historian can ask. Seventy thousand years ago, several human species lived on Earth, and ours, Homo sapiens, was one animal among many, confined to a corner of Africa. Today it dominates the planet, has driven most large animals to extinction and is beginning to redesign life itself. How did this happen? And has it been good for the people who lived through it?

The path through it

Harari divides the story into three revolutions.

The cognitive revolution, which he places roughly seventy thousand years ago, gave sapiens a new kind of language. Other animals communicate about what is in front of them. Sapiens could talk about things that do not exist: spirits, myths and abstractions. Harari argues that this ability to believe in shared fictions is what allowed sapiens to cooperate in groups far larger than the hundred and fifty or so people an individual can know personally. Strangers who believe in the same god, the same laws or the same money can work together. Chimpanzees cannot. In the same period, sapiens spread across the world, and many other large animals, and the other human species, disappeared.

The agricultural revolution, beginning about twelve thousand years ago, saw people in several regions domesticate plants and animals. Harari argues provocatively that it was a trap. Farming produced more food in total and allowed populations to grow, but individual farmers worked harder than foragers, had a less varied diet, suffered more disease and lived under new hierarchies. Wheat, in his phrase, domesticated humans as much as humans domesticated wheat. The surplus supported cities, kingdoms and writing, and with them new imagined orders, systems of belief such as law codes and religions that justified hierarchy.

He then describes the unification of humankind. Three universal orders, money, empire and universal religions, drew humanity toward a single global society. Money, he argues, is the most universal system of mutual trust ever devised, because it lets strangers who share nothing else cooperate.

The scientific revolution, beginning about five hundred years ago, was driven by a new admission of ignorance. Earlier traditions assumed that the important truths were already known. Modern science began by admitting that they were not, and set out to find them. Combined with empire and capitalism, which funded exploration and research in the expectation of future growth, science gave Europe extraordinary power.

Where it arrives

Harari arrives at an unsettling question. Humans are far more powerful than before, but are they happier? He reviews research on happiness and suggests that the answer is unclear. Much of the improvement in material life has been offset by rising expectations, and the suffering of domesticated animals, raised in industrial conditions, is an enormous moral cost that histories rarely count.

He ends by looking ahead. Sapiens, he suggests, may soon use biotechnology and computing to transform itself into something else, and the question that matters most is not what we can become but what we want to become.

What remains open

The book’s sweep is its appeal and the source of most criticism. Specialists in archaeology, anthropology and evolutionary biology have argued that some of its claims are simplified or speculative: that the cognitive revolution was more gradual than a single event, that the picture of foragers’ lives is too rosy, that some accounts of particular societies are inaccurate. Harari has acknowledged that a book of this scope must simplify.

The idea of shared fictions also raises philosophical questions. Calling money, nations and human rights fictions captures that they depend on collective belief, but some readers argue that the word obscures the difference between beliefs that are useful and true in their own way and those that are merely invented.

What it asks of someone deciding

The book asks which stories your organisation runs on. Companies, brands and currencies exist because people believe in them together. Leaders who understand that culture is a shared story can strengthen it, and those who forget it may be surprised by how quickly it can unravel.

It asks whether progress is making people’s lives better or only bigger. Harari’s treatment of the agricultural revolution is a warning: an innovation can increase total output and still leave individuals worse off. The site’s idea page The Jevons Paradox explores another way gains can be absorbed.

And it asks what you are ignorant of. The scientific revolution began with the admission that important things were unknown. Organisations that assume they already know what matters stop looking.