Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

First published in Hebrew in 2011, with the English translation following in 2014, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind examining the shaping of human history. Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari shines a light, sometimes harshly, on how humans have exploited the ideas of capitalism, religion, and politics to control the globe and put the species Homo sapiens on the threshold of banishing natural selection. Sapiens landed on the New York Times best-seller list and won the National Library of China’s Wenjin Book Award for best book published in 2014. In 2019, Sapiens won the Academic Book Week Book of the Year award as part of the UK’s Academic Book Trade Conference Awards.

Harari describes the development of the human species across an evolutionary framework from the earliest stages through to the present day and concludes by sharing some sweeping predictions for our future. During the Cognitive Revolution (70,000 years ago), Homo sapiens developed cognitive abilities that surpassed other humans of the age. The Agricultural Revolution (10,000 years ago) brought about humans’ domestication of plants and animals, and the Scientific Revolution (500 years ago) ushered in an era of exploration, science, and capitalism that defines today’s societies. The Industrial Revolution (200 years ago) transformed and fashioned Homo sapiens, the only remaining human species, into what they are today.

Advancement is generally thought to improve the quality of life, but Sapiens maintains that the opposite is true. Our hunter-gatherer predecessors had many advantages that we no longer enjoy. We rely on technology and medical advances, while our quality of life and our maintenance of the environment remain far from ideal. From this point of view, Harari wonders how our species, with such destruction in our wake, came to dominate the planet. The author postulates that this outcome is due to our ability to communicate and believe in ideas that do not exist.

The concept of shared myths facilitates cooperation between strangers and has led to the unification of humankind. The strangers we cooperate with are not only people in our community; they include the now-massive number of humans living on Earth. Examples of the myths that allow cooperation, development, and relatively peaceful living include religion, empires and government, mathematics and writing, and money. These ideas allow family groups, communities, and nations not only to exist but also to grow and flourish. Humans are now on the brink of another revolution, Harari argues, having become akin to gods by transcending natural selection using genetic engineering and hastening the age of intelligent design.