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Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens Sparknotes

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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 …show more content…

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

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The modern humans gained many beneficial traits to help them as they explored into new environments - and may not have survived without the help of the hybridisation. On the other hand, there is not enough fossil evidence of the interbreeding between species, which could suggest that the two species did not interbreed often or when they did interbreed they did not produce

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Between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, the human race created the “Great Leap Forward”. Human development was dominant in some countries than others. The animals most common to the human race are gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees. Around 11,000 B.C. were the first sightings of villages to be seen. Fossils show that the human race changed about 2.5 million years

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This however is not true, animals are still evolving and may or already have become more complex than the human species. “Ishmael” uses a metaphor to represent this, when an anthropologist asks a jellyfish what his creation myth is the jellyfishes climax of the myth was “but finally the jellyfish appeared!” (Quinn 56). Ishmael uses this story to explain that the world was not made for humans, it doesn’t revolve around human existence. The human species will come and go just like every other animal on earth.

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The case of the collision of Cajamarca brings forth to light the differences between Old World and New World societies. Our human ancestors from the beginning survive as hunters-gatherers but that change 10,000 years ago as the Holocene period sought to shift into food production. It was a new lifestyle, one that began with the rise of the Natufian culture. In lecture 10, it stated that, “Natufians were foragers who lived by hunting and gathering, but they had settled down and lived in particular locations” (Love, 10). The Natufian culture has been linked to have trade networks, however, cultivation evidence was found in Levant.

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The authors of Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson present a thesis stating that human beings and chimpanzees both act aggressively and violently, which are common characteristic among our closest ancestors. Based on the author’s argument, human violence was inherited on to us through the process of evolution. The authors used examples based on the observations they made while studying chimpanzees. There is a resemblance between human warfare and the behavior associated with the chimpanzee. A group of chimpanzees walks quietly around the territory and then initiate an attack on the neighboring male (Wrangham, 1996, p.69).

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Language has allowed the human species to advance unlike any other species as Pagel stated that “chimpanzees are using tools to communicate”. Chimpanzees have the ability to communicate on a level where they can establish and build social relationship among each of them. Over the years there is one question that has been left unanswered. “Why would they use a stick to extract termites from the ground”? Since Pagel stated that “the Chimpanzees were intelligent” I think that if we us human being were that intelligent as the Chimpanzees that were our ancestor years ago , we would have understand more the use of language.

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Similarly, Jared Diamond’s award winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Faith of Human Societies, describes humanity’s conquest, and those who had the most strengths and advantages were the ones who survived the obstacles and hardships of their journey and conquered everybody else. In this critically acclaimed book, Diamond tries to answer a supposedly easy question by a New Guinea local, Yali, who asks, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (Diamond, 14) as he explores humanity’s history extending to 13,000 years ago arguing the themes of the development of human civilization, geographic advantages and disadvantages, and humanity’s conquest of the world.omingo 2 Yali’s question poses a great significance in the inquiry of the development of human civilization. As humanity progressed from savagery and into civilization, the imbalance of

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For primates to have survived this long they had to be cooperative with one another and that goes for humans too.

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The actual idea is very broad and does include tools and social hierarchy’s, but provides a short summary of how these traits are actually not unique to humans at all. Bonobos, like Kanzi, have been taught the meaning behind words, and are able to identify these objects using a lexigram (IPLS 2007), but this only shows the ability of communication between humans and bonobos. Bonobos and other non-human apes (along with many other organisms) use smells, gestures, and body language to speak to one another. Bonobos are also very intellectual, they are able to learn things very quickly, and some have the same grasp on words as a 3 year old child. Bonobosalong with other apes are in fact very similar to

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It is true that all social animals communicate with each other, from bees and ants to wheels and apes, but only humans have developed a language which is more than set of prearranged signals. No doubt human speech differs in physical way from the communication of other animals. It is impossible to find out that when and how the special talent of language is developed, but it’s clear that its evolution must have been a long process to develop. Origin of language The origin of language is a huge debatable topic over the years.

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