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I’m not into historical books, at all. I find them usually boring to read, and I have difficulties trying to finish them (and I don’t). But I read a lot of good reviews about « Sapiens : a brief history of human kind », and a lot of my friends recommanded it to me, so I decided to give it a try, and what a book it is !
Sapiens is an Essay, written by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, and Israeli historian, philosopher and a professor in the department of history at the Hebraw university of Jerusalem. The book sums up the evolution of archaic human species in the stone age up to the 21st century, focusing on Homo Sapiens. It devides the history of Sapiens into 4 parts :
ð The cognitive revolution
ð The agricultural revolution
ð The unification of human kind
ð The scientific revolution
Harari defends the idea that Sapiens dominate the world because they’re the only animal that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Harari demonstrates in a convincing way that it’s our fictions, and our ability to share them, that give us an immense power in nature. Many mammals can somehow cooperate in small numbers through intimate acquantances. In addition, other species can cooperate in large numbers by hard-wired instincts. But humans can do both, we can flexibly cooperate in small or in huge groups, and that because of our fictions. And what do we mean by fictions ? it’s kind of a software that we can use quickly to get adapted to the environment around us. These fictions include our langages, our nations, our gods, money, human rights and much more. Harari claims that all human cooperation systems : religions, political structures, trade networks and legal institutions- owe their emergence to sapiens’ cognitive capacity for fiction.
Then Harari talks about the agricultural revolution, and how it makes, for some sapiens, life better by promoting growth and co-evolving species, and for others how it made their diet and daily lives stricted in a limited nutrition. He also insists in the human’s violent treatment towards other animals.
Harari also talks about how the political and economic fields got revoluted, and how capitalism was born.
And finally, Harari discusses the scientific revolution, and also emphasises the lack of researches into happiness’s history, arguing that people today are not as happier as people in the past era.
What a fantastic book. I can relate now the massive positive reviews about it. I really like how the autor made it easy to express an idea, beginning revolution by revolution, conception by conception, religion by religion, and never getting it boring. Most of all, this book made me wonder how we evolved, wonder at how all the fictions had an impact in our evolution, and how we will end up. The final chapter of the book gives us a theory about the future, making me really excited to read « Homo Deus »
And you ? Do you like these kind of books ? And have you read « sapiens » ? We would love to hear your thoughts about it
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