Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens Sparknotes

In the book Sapiens written by author Yuval Noah Harari, explaining to us the thrilling account of our amazing history, from insignificant apes to rulers of the world and being the most dominating species on it. Since the book is about everything on our planets history, it begins at the beginning, with the Big Bang. Harari then explains the appearance of atoms and molecules on Earth and of course leading to the evolution and development of life on the planet. While I found this book insightful and interesting, I couldn’t avoid a continuous feeling to do more of my own research. Which comes as no surprise seeing as Sapiens is one of those books about everything in general, nothing in particular, A blend of fascinating facts, reasonable theories

Harari considers the large cost of energy it takes in maintaining such an expensive thinking organ and the related deterioration of our physical strength compared with other primates. He correctly points out that it’s not entirely obvious what first spurred the development of our species incredible intelligence but begins to scratch the service in finding it out. On the origins of language, however, Harari is more certain: It evolved as a way for social animals to gossip about other people’s reputations. In addition, language allows people to communicate about abstract concepts such as religion. And religion, in turn, bonds people together and permits cooperation among much larger populations than chimpanzee troops can sustain. We also see our hunter-gatherer ancestors were not always cooperative, though. Harari stays well balanced by citing the high level of violence among prehistoric populations and present-day foragers. He also admonishes readers not to take the romanticized view that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature, because we have been, since our earliest days, the deadliest species in the histories of biology. Within only 2,000 years of humanity’s arrival in the New World, indigenous peoples and some species were drove to extinction. In summary Harari gives the standard history of humans from about 70kya to about 12kya; Sapiens spread out of Africa, destroying or replacing many populations that appeared in their way, including both megafauna and other humans. Although some managed to contribute genes to modern Sapiens, like Neanderthals, but this is likely cold comfort to animals, peoples, and cultures buried by rivals that were not individually stronger, but more suited to large-scale