Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind: A Summary

By Betty Bassett

Historians do not design cities, construct airplanes, build bridges, or put people in jail so what is point of history?  Why should we read history and who cares about dead people anyway?

History gives us insight into ourselves, other people and the society that we live in. If we read history then it teaches us how human beings and societies behave.  It then becomes predictable.  Mankind hasn't changed for over 70,000 years.  The man before you today is no greater evolved than the man who lived in caves.

History gives us evidence of how people lived in the past and the choices that they made.  It's like watching domino's fall.  If we read about history then we can see what made the first domino fall and how that created other dominoes other dominoes to fall.

History gives us information on how societies function. Life and the structure of society is often a science lab.  There has been monarchy and democracy in past ages as well as socialism and communism.  As a student of history we can see the things that they aspired to and the ways that they succeeded or failed.

With this information we gathered  of past success and failure we then analyze the best ways to procure, structure and mold our modern world.

When we study history it gives us a perspective on change.  Life is change.  And change is a bitter pill.  Change means destruction, loss as well as death.  So as we study history we come to understand how other people embrace that bitter pill.  Considering their lives  gives us a greater wisdom for having made the journey.

History provides us with a timeline to help us understand how we got from the past to where we are now.  The past is endlessly interesting.  People have lived countless lifetimes.  They have endured enormous suffering.  They have lived incredible charmed lives.  The feat of a human life is nearly immeasurable from Leonardo da Vinci, Julius Caesar, Aristotle, Newton, Marcus Aurelius to Benjamin Franklin and Elon Musk.

Our engagement in history gives us 20/20 hindsight because we look at people's  mistakes and learn from them.  We learn what to avoid.  Sometimes we learn in which direction lies progress.

History, a story of our past, when well told is beautiful.  We get to relive lives past in our imagination.  

Biography and military history appeal because of the tales they contain. When we read well written stories it's a revelation about how people think and feel, what drove them to action, their weaknesses and struggles, and ultimately their accomplishments. 

The examination of history provokes us to consider the human experience in a point in time in a particular location. Our minds busily reconstruct the past. We immerse ourselves into that reconstruction. We consider the ways that people were in that age, in that era, in that decade, in that time. We consider what made for their life, the ways that it was significant. We consider our lives from that person's point of view.  We experience beauty from their eyes.  We see and feel, and hear and and touch and taste life in a different context and in a different time.

History also makes us ponder the morality of what is right and wrong. We consider the complexities that individuals of the past have faced in varying settings and how people have weathered the adversities they have encountered. These historical people are not characters in a romance novel. They actually lived in a point in time and space. When we read about their lives we learn from their examples and by their example. History gives us lessons in inspiration and courage so that we may live our lives boldly.

Looking at history provides us with a sense of who we are even if sometimes we're just chasing down our own family tree.  

The study of history can be distorted though and we must bear in mind that it is the conquering nation that gets to tell the story of their victory for the history books.

Scrutinizing history gives us a lesson on how to be good in our point in time, in our community, in our country, in our world.

Having established the value of history, let's consider Yuval Harari's book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind.

In his book he states that evolution have favored those who are capable of forming ties. (Other species that form ties are bees, ants, lions, chimpanzees, dolphins, hawks, kookaburras, goat fish, crocodiles and hyenas.)  Because homo sapiens could hunt in groups, we could lead animals into trapped spaces then slaughter them. We then would have food for months. No other animals can band together to our extent because no other animals can tell stories. We excel at communication and organization. Our ability to tell stories is a superpower that allowed for the creation of religions and economic systems.  

Yuval Harrari states that "Homo sapiens are myth-makers; they use imagination and language to create and communicate new worlds, alternatives and possibilities. The importance of shared myths is that they allow Sapiens to cooperate, organise at scale, and dominate the world. Without myths, there is no glue to bind Sapiens together. At an individual level, humans might be memory-makers, but as a species-level they are myth-makers.

The myths Sapiens share define who they are and what they do. Take money, a most powerful shared fiction. Dollar bills are meaningless tokens without the ‘shared fiction’ that they have value. Endowed with shared meaning, money becomes a unit of exchange, peace of mind, and the measure of our choices. And importantly, it explains behaviour.

Break the myth and you break the world, leading to dramatic and rapid social change. Break the myth of monarchy, slavery, patriarchy and you change the pattern of history."

The human animal excels at socialization. Compared to other animals we physically are weak but we have strength in numbers. That number is limited to 150, a number by which we max out in our capacity to trust another individual and to hold them as a part of our tribe.

A dominant theme in Yuval Harari's book is the sense that homo sapiens aren’t better off now than we were before the invention of agriculture.

Being farmers as opposed to foragers was not good for people as individuals. Farmers worked longer hours and lived with higher risk of disease and malnutrition.

Jared Diamond in his book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" called the advance to agriculture the worst mistake in human history.

“While people in today’s affluent societies work an average of forty to forty-five hours a week, and people in the developing world work sixty and even eighty hours a week, hunter-gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats — such as the Kalahari Desert — work on average for just thirty-five to forty-five hours a week. They hunt only one day out of three, and gathering takes up just three to six hours daily. In normal times, this is enough to feed the band. It may well be that ancient hunter-gatherers living in zones more fertile than the Kalahari spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials. On top of that, foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores. They had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no floors to polish, no nappies to change and no bills to pay.”

Corey Brier states in his article, Takeaways from Sapiens by Yuval Harari, states "In some ways, foragers are even smarter than us, as the ultimate generalists next to our specialists. We have data storage and retrieval tools like writing, iPhones, and the Internet that let us be stupid — why memorize the stars when you have Google Maps? Evolution died with the rise of agriculture."

Yuval Harari, in his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind says, "Hunter-gatherers had a better life because they spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution 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. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa."

In Sapiens A Brief Study of Human Kind, we are convinced that everything we knew about the world is wrong.  In the study of history we learn that society hangs together with structures made of ideas.

References:

https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/sapiens

https://medium.com/coreybreier-com/takeaways-from-sapiens-by-yuval-harari-1ed12a875a32

https://www.unboundedwisdom.com/9-key-takeaways-from-sapiens-by-yuval-harari/

https://fullylived.com/takeaways-sapiens/

https://brandgenetics.com/speed-summary-sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/yuval-noah-harari-gives-the-really-big-picture

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/sapiens-brief-history-humankind-yuval-noah-harari-review

https://www.nateliason.com/notes/sapiens-yuval-noah-harari?scrlybrkr=b7774c50

https://youtu.be/v4EIODEpYXE

https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/historical-archives/why-study-history-(1998)

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/why-i-finally-read-sapiens