Sapiens provides a scientific perspective on the history of humans through three revolutions. He has since published two more books: Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

He is currently a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli public intellectual and historian. If you don’t already have the book, order the book or get the audiobook for free to learn the juicy details. Has Sapiens been gathering dust on your bookshelf? Instead, pick up the key ideas now. Humans are now on the brink of another revolution, Harari argues, having become akin to gods by transcending natural selection using genetic engineering and hastening the age of intelligent design.Life gets busy. These ideas allow family groups, communities, and nations not only to exist but also to grow and flourish. Examples of the myths that allow cooperation, development, and relatively peaceful living include religion, empires and government, mathematics and writing, and money.

The strangers we cooperate with are not only people in our community they include the now-massive number of humans living on Earth. The concept of shared myths facilitates cooperation between strangers and has led to the unification of humankind. The author postulates that this outcome is due to our ability to communicate and believe in ideas that do not exist. From this point of view, Harari wonders how our species, with such destruction in our wake, came to dominate the planet. We rely on technology and medical advances, while our quality of life and our maintenance of the environment remain far from ideal. Our hunter-gatherer predecessors had many advantages that we no longer enjoy. The Industrial Revolution (200 years ago) transformed and fashioned Homo sapiens, the only remaining human species, into what they are today.Īdvancement is generally thought to improve the quality of life, but Sapiens maintains that the opposite is true. The Agricultural Revolution (10,000 years ago) brought about humans’ domestication of plants and animals, and the Scientific Revolution (500 years ago) ushered in an era of exploration, science, and capitalism that defines today’s societies. During the Cognitive Revolution (70,000 years ago), Homo sapiens developed cognitive abilities that surpassed other humans of the age. Harari describes the development of the human species across an evolutionary framework from the earliest stages through to the present day and concludes by sharing some sweeping predictions for our future.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari