Israeli academic discusses the history of mankind

Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind presents us with a refreshing and original way of perceiving the history of our species, Homo sapiens, since its emergence in East Africa about 2.5 million years ago. Just the vast scope of the book alone makes it seem a clever novelty.

Humans  once had various “siblings” such as Neanderthals, which we evidently wiped out almost everywhere we encountered them. But we also loved our enemies. DNA evidence shows that, back about 30,000 or 40,000 years ago, some sapiens and Neanderthals mated and reared families. That’s just one of many skeletons in our closet that Harari rattles in this imaginative and thought-provoking book.

Homo sapiens underwent a critically important “cognitive revolution” about 70,000 years ago, which drastically improved our ability to use language, make art, create myths and indulge in abstract thinking. As a result, masses of ancient humans banded together in increasingly larger tribal units. Tribes of hunter-gatherers that had a shared belief in myths or gods could co-operate with each other in greater numbers, which became a competitive edge when rival groups battled for supremacy.

For countless millennia, human tribes wiped each other out on a regular basis. Also great despoilers of nature, we were equally adept at expunging mammoths and other great beasts that once roamed the earth. 

With an impressive array of scientific and historical knowledge in his quiver, Harari brings home ideas like an expert marksman. His comparisons of human cultures (i.e., Mayan vs. Roman) and epochs (Stone Age vs. Internet Age), seem especially enlightening and entertaining. “The instinct to gorge on high-calorie food was hard-wired into our genes,” he writes. “Today we may be living in highrise apartments with over-stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in the Savannah. That’s what makes us spoon down an entire tub of Ben & Jerry’s when we find one in the freezer and wash it down with a jumbo Coke.”

In the days of the hunter-gatherers, humans were spread out thinly over vast areas and a person might encounter no more than a few hundred others in a lifetime. Until the Agricultural Revolution of about 12,000 years ago, there were fewer people on Earth than the present population of Cairo. 

Harari offers fascinating insight into the era when barley, rice, potatoes and other crops were first cultivated, a period that saw the rise of cities, city-states, and eventually political empires and universal religions. I was disappointed that he didn’t discuss this transformative epoch in relation to the emergence of the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish people  – certainly an important historical moment – but that clearly wasn’t his interest. As for the Jews, he observes that they, along with the Armenians and Georgians, could justly claim descent from ancient Middle Eastern peoples, but notes they have picked up much baggage in their travels.

“It goes without saying that the political, economic and social practices of modern Jews, for example, owe far more to the empires under which they lived during the past two millennia than to the traditions of the ancient kingdom of Judaea,” he writes. “If King David were to show up in an ultra-Orthodox synagogue in present-day Jerusalem, he would be utterly bewildered to find people dressed in east European clothes, speaking in a German dialect (Yiddish) and having endless arguments about the meaning of a Babylonian text (the Talmud). There were neither synagogues, volumes of Talmud, nor even Torah scrolls in ancient Judaea.”

The latter sections of Sapiens focuses on the history and significance of money and the rise of global religion and political empires. Depending on their political views, some readers may find a number of the author’s assertions to be provocative. The Agricultural Revolution is “history’s biggest fraud,” he asserts, because it promised but failed to deliver a better quality of life for the world’s peasant class. Instead, it enslaved us, tied us to the land, and put us in “artificial enclaves” called homes. He also questions whether the Scientific Revolution that began about 500 years ago has actually been beneficial to us.

A certain cynicism seems to ooze from the page at times, as when Harari contends that there’s no such thing as human rights, that humans live their lives in perceptual prisons, and that Westerners have experienced 2,000 years of “monotheistic brainwashing.” But sadly, few can quibble when he declares that humans are destroying the planet.

In contrast to his dystopian vision of modern Western society, he seems to regard the era of the hunter-gatherers as an idyllic utopia. Apparently everyone ate a nicely balanced diet back then and no one had to work too hard. No matter that a much higher proportion of humanity died in war or from disease.

During an interview in Toronto in mid-February, Harari told me that modern man has lost the ability to live richly and spontaneously. “Hunter-gatherers always lived in the present moment,” he said. “They were extremely aware of their sensory world, of everything they heard and smelled and touched, because their survival depended on it. Today, especially in advanced societies, people don’t need to pay attention in order to survive; therefore we are continually distracted and we have lost much of the ability to actually inhabit our bodies and our world, and to pay attention to what we hear, see, smell and touch.” 

A lecturer in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Israeli-born author was teaching a course  on world history a few years back when he noticed that his students craved a Hebrew-language book on the topic. “I took my lecture notes and transformed them into a book,” he said. “And when it became a huge bestseller in Israel, I translated it into English, and now it’s been translated into almost 30 languages worldwide.” 

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind opens as a witty page-turner about the human family but its extended and uneven discussion of money robs it of some of its lustre. Even so, there is still a mother lode of gold here amidst the dross.