Sapiens
| Title | Sapiens
a brief history of humankind |
|---|---|
| Original title | קיצור תולדות האנושות |
| Author | Yuval Noah Harari |
| Publication | Vintage |
| Size | X, 498p |
| Language |  ENG |
| ISBN | 9780099590088 |
| Topics |
World history Humanity |
| Notes | 100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come? In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical – and sometimes devastating – breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, palaeontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come? Bold, wide-ranging and provocative, Sapiens challenges everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our power ... and our future. [back cover] The book surveys the history of humankind from the evolution of archaic human species in the Stone Age up to the twenty-first century. Its main argument is that Homo sapiens dominates the world because it is the only animal that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Besides, the author claims that prehistoric sapiens may have committed a massive genocide, leading other homo species such as the Neanderthals into extinction. The book further argues that Homo sapiens can cooperate flexibly in large numbers, because it has a unique ability to believe in things existing purely in its own imagination, such as gods, nations, money and human rights. The author claims that all large scale human cooperation systems – including religions, political structures, trade networks and legal institutions – are ultimately based on fiction. Other salient arguments of the book are that money is a system of mutual trust; that political and economic systems are actually religions rather than economic theories or ideologies; that the agricultural revolution started as a promise of luxury but ended as a trap that made peoples' lives worse; that empire has been the most successful political system of the last 2,000 years; that money, empires and religions are the powers that are unifying the world; that the treatment of domesticated animals is among the worst crimes in history; that people today are not significantly happier than in past eras; and that humans are currently in the process of upgrading themselves into gods. [wikipedia] |
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