Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind

Yuval Noah Harari “Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind” Harper Collins, 2015, 416 pp.

The author is a renowned historian and this book is a #1 international bestseller. He describes how at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth about 100,000 years ago. Today only one remains—Homo sapiens.  These ancestors, about 70,000 years ago, experienced a Cognitive Revolution and this kick-started history with the first of three important revolutions.  Following the Cognitive Revolution was the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago which transformed Sapiens from hunters and foragers to inhabitants of settlements.  Finally the Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, contained the Industrial Revolution which still defines current events.  This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms. (pg. 3).

My Notes:

Pg. 3:  About 3.8 billion years ago certain molecules on earth combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms.  The story of organisms is called biology.  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.

There were humans long before there was history.  Animals much like modern humans first appeared about 2.5 million years ago.  But for countless generations they did not stand out from the myriad other organisms with which they shared their habitats.

Pg. 5:  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…  Humans first evolved in East Africa about 2.5 million years ago from an earlier genus of apes called Australopithecus.  About 2 million years ago, some of these archaic men and women left their homeland to journey through and settle vast areas of North Africa, Europe, and Asia.  Humans in Europe and western Asia evolved into Homo neanderthalensis.  The more eastern regions of Asia were populated by Homo erectus (who survived there for close to 2 million years, making it the most durable human species ever.)

Homo floresiensis adapted to less food by reaching a maximum height of only 3.5 feet and weighed no more than fifty-five pounds.  As recent as 2010 another evidence of another ancient human sibling was discovered in Siberia: Homo denisova.

Pg. 8:  It’s a common fallacy to envision hominid species as arranged in a straight line of descent, with Ergaster begetting Erectus, Erectus begetting the Neanderthals, and the Neanderthals evolving into us.  The truth is the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species of which we, Homo sapiens, are the survivors. 

Pg. 9:  In Homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2-3 percent of total body weight, but it consumes 25 percent of the body’s energy when the body is at rest.  Brains of other apes require only 8 percent of rest-time body energy.

Pg. 16:  It has been determined that 1-4 percent of the unique DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA.  Up to 6 percent of the unique human DNA of modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan DNA.  It seems that 50,000 years ago Sapiens were still able to breed with these other hominids.

Pg. 32:  Ever since the Cognitive Revolution (70,000 years ago), Sapiens have been living in a dual reality.  On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions, and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations, and corporations.  As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful. 

Under the right circumstances myths can change rapidly.  In 1789 the French population switched almost overnight from believing in the myth of the divine right of kings to believing in the myth of the sovereignty of the people.  This ability to change behavior rapidly has opened a fast lane of cultural evolution, bypassing the traffic jams of genetic evolution. 

Pg. 66:  During the last million years, there has been an ice age on average every 100,000 years.  The last one ran from about 75,000 to 15,000 years ago.  It had twin peaks, the first about 70,000 years ago and the second at about 20,000 years ago. 

Pg. 69:  About 14,000 BC the first Americans arrived on the continent as the sea levels were low enough that a land bridge connected Siberia with Alaska.  Sapiens had learned to make snowshoes and effective thermal clothing composed of layers of furs and skins sewn together. 

Pg. 79:  The Agricultural Revolution (around 9,500 BC) certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.  Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites (its called the Malthusian Trap).  The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

Pg. 122:  About 3,500 BC the Sumerians invented writing.  At first it was essentially used to record facts and figures for retention outside a human brain.  In the ninth century AD, the Hindus invented a new partial script that could store and process mathematical data with unprecedented efficiency.  This partial script was composed of ten signs, representing the numbers from 0 to 9  These signs, though invented by Hindus, are known as Arabic numerals because when the Arabs invaded India they adopted the system and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe.  

Pg. 145:  Deuteronomy 22:28—9: If a man rapes a virgin and is found out he must give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and marry the girl.  Ancient Hebrews considered this a reasonable arrangement. 

As of 2006, there were still fifty-three countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife.  Even in Germany, rape laws were amended only in 1997 to create a legal category of marital rape.

Pg. 178:  Even today coins and banknotes are a rare form of money.  The sum total of money in the world is about $60 trillion; more than $50 trillion of this exists only on computer servers. 

Pg. 207:  Since around 200 BC, most humans have lived in empires.  It seems likely that in the future, too, most humans will live in one.  But this time the empire will be truly global.  As the twenty-first century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground, in spite of close to 200 independent states now in existence.  Not one of these independent states is really able to execute independent economic policies, to declare and wage wars as it pleases, or even to run its known internal affairs as it sees fit.  States are increasingly open to the machinations of global markets to the interference of global companies and NGOs, and to the supervision of global public opinion and the international judicial system.  States are obliged to conform to global standards of financial behavior environmental policy and justice.  Immensely powerful currents of capital, labor, and information turn and shape the world, with a growing disregard for the borders and opinions of states.

Pg. 210:  Today religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement, and disunion.  Yet, in fact, religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires.   Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority.  This has helped ensure social stability. 

Pg. 228:  The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism, and Nazism.  These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies.  But if a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam, even though Islam sees the superhuman order governing the world as the edict of an omnipotent creator god, whereas Soviet Communism did not believe in gods.

Pg. 247:  In the past 500 years the human population has increased fourteen-fold, production 240-fold, and energy consumption 115-fold. 

Pg. 264:  Until the Scientific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress.  They thought the golden age was in the past, and that the world was stagnant, if not deteriorating.  Strict adherence to the wisdom of the ages might perhaps bring back the good old times.

Pg. 276:  Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, scurvy is estimated to have claimed the lives of about 2 million sailors.  The turning point came in 1747 when a British physician, James Lind, discovered by experiment that eating citrus fruits would eliminate this problem.  We now know it is vitamin C, contained in citrus fruits, that is the key.

Pg. 280:  In 1775 Asia accounted for 80 percent of the world economy.  The combined economies of India and China alone represented two-thirds of global production.  In comparison, Europe was an economic dwarf.  The global center of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans humiliated the Asian powers in a series of wars and conquered large parts of Asia.  By 1900 Europeans firmly controlled the world’s economy and most of its territory.  In 1950 Western Europe and the US together accounted for more than half of global production, whereas China’s portion had been reduced to 5 percent. 

Pg. 282:  Europe (the west) can attribute its success to modern science and capitalism.  Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way even before they enjoyed any significant technological advantages.  When the technological bonanza began, Europeans could harness it far better than anybody else. 

 Pg. 290:  The Chinese Admiral Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 led seven huge armadas from China to the far reaches of the Indian Ocean.  The largest of these comprised almost 300 ships and carried close to 30,000 people.  They visited Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and East Africa.  Columbus’s three small ships manned by 120 sailors—was like a trio of mosquitoes compared to Zheng He’s armada.  However, when the ruling faction in Beijing changed during the 1430s, the new overlords abruptly terminated the operations of Zheng He.

The Zheng He expeditions prove that Europe did not enjoy an outstanding technological edge.  What made Europeans exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer. 

Pg. 308:  Overcoming the world view that the past was better than the present, was critical to the Industrial Revolution as trust in the future allowed credit to flourish—credit is critical to capital investment.  If the global pie stayed the same size, there was no margin for credit.  Then came the Scientific Revolution and the idea of progress. The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things improve. 

Pg. 329:  Markets by themselves offer no protection against fraud, theft and violence.  It is the job of political systems to ensure trust by legislating sanctions against cheats and to establish and support police forces, courts, and jails which will enforce the law. 

When political systems fail to do their job, we get the Mississippi Bubble of 1719 or the US housing bubble of 2007.  

Furthermore, at the end of the Middle Ages, slavery was almost unknown in Christian Europe.  During the early modern period, the rise of European capitalism went hand in hand with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade.  Unrestrained market forces, rather than tyrannical kings or racist ideologues, were responsible for this calamity.

Pg. 399:  Natural selection may be supplemented or even replaced in current society with intelligent design by any of three ways: through biological engineering, cyborg engineering (cyborgs are beings that combine organic with non-organic parts) or the engineering of inorganic life.

Pg. 402:  A team of Russian, Japanese and Korean scientist has recently mapped the genome of ancient mammoths found frozen in the Siberian ice.  They now plan to take a fertilized egg-cell of a present-day elephant, replace the elephantine DNA with a reconstructed mammoth DNA, and implant the egg in the womb of an elephant.  They expect the first mammoth in 5,000 years to be born.