Book Review | Sapiens

A Brief History of Humankind | Part 1

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli Historian, Author and Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was born on February 24, 1976 in Israel. He completed his PhD degree from University of Oxford in 2002. His most famous book is “Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind”. Other books include “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow”, and “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”.

In part one, the writer explains “Cognitive Revolution”. The book starts from the beginning of the Homo Sapiens’ arrival on the earth. The story starts from the beginning to the coming of Agricultural Revolution. The writer leaves us with many questions yet unanswered.

The most important topic of this part is the invention of fictions. Due to this, the course of history has changed and people began to believe in the unknown, known as “Imagined Reality”. Fictions and imagined realities make our foragers think in a different way that makes them believe in religions, nations and Gods. Before the invention of fictions people only knew about physical things such as rivers, mountains and animals.

Another important point is that, does Homo Sapiens were the reason for the extinction of other species or the climate changes make it so. Whatever the reason may be, but there are evidences that the Homo Sapiens makes other species extinct on a large scale.

According to the writer, we do not have exact evidence of the life of the people before the agricultural revolution. How people live, what they do in morning, what they eat or were there wars or peace. As many species have gone extinct, we find it hard to find records of those species. There were two big mass extinctions in our history. And we are now in the third and final mass extinction.

I encourage you to read this book. This book covers the details of many important topics. In this book the writer explains the relationship of History with Biology, and how we separate both these terms, and why only humans rule the world. Does their large brains and intelligence ability help them to rule the world?

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”

“Biology enables, Culture forbids.”

“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.”