There is the rise of religion and the slow overpowering of polytheisms by more or less toxic monotheisms. Harari embeds many other momentous events, most notably the development of language: we become able to think sharply about abstract matters, cooperate in ever larger numbers, and, perhaps most crucially, gossip. Harari suspects that the biotechnological revolution signals the end of sapiens: we will be replaced by bioengineered post-humans, 'amortal' cyborgs, capable of living forever. It triggers the industrial revolution, about 250 years ago, which triggers in turn the information revolution, about 50 years ago, which triggers the biotechnological revolution, which is still wet behind the ears. The 'scientific revolution' begins about 500 years ago.

About 11,000 years ago we enter on the agricultural revolution, converting in increasing numbers from foraging (hunting and gathering) to farming. First, the 'cognitive' revolution: about 70,000 years ago, we start to behave in far more ingenious ways than before, for reasons that are still obscure, and we spread rapidly across the planet. But the deep lines of the story of sapiens are fairly uncontentious, and he sets them out with verve.įor the first half of our existence we potter along unremarkably then we undergo a series of revolutions. The fact remains that the history of sapiens – Harari's name for us – is only a very small part of the history of humankind.Ĭan its full sweep be conveyed in one fell swoop – 400 pages? Not really it's easier to write a brief history of time – all 14bn years – and Harari also spends many pages on our present and possible future rather than our past. It's easy to see why Yuval Noah Harari devotes 95% of his book to us as a species: self-ignorant as we are, we still know far more about ourselves than about other species of human beings, including several that have become extinct since we first walked the Earth.

So a book whose main title is Sapiens shouldn't be subtitled 'A Brief History of Humankind'. Homo sapiens, our own wildly egregious species of great apes, has only existed for 6% of that time – about 150,000 years. H uman beings (members of the genus Homo) have existed for about 2.4m years.

Yuval noah harari sapiens bd