Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Summary)
by Yuval Harari
When I was younger, I paid attention in most classes, except for history. I don’t know why I didn’t like history but as I’ve gotten older the only thing I want to read is history.
Sadness set in when this book ended. The author takes you on an educational ride, full of stories I wish they taught in school. I’ll skip through some of the facts and take us back to 70 thousand years ago where organisms belonging to homo sapiens started to form more elaborate structures, called cultures. When cultures began to blossom, this was the beginning of history and marked the first time that what happened in the past became important.
Many believe there were three important revolutions that shaped history: cognitive, agricultural, and scientific. The cognitive revolution was thought to have started around 70 thousand years ago, the agricultural revolution was around 12 thousand years ago, and the scientific revolution has just started (500 years ago). Collective knowledge amongst humans today is far greater than it was hundreds of years ago, but our ancient ancestors may have had slightly larger brains and far superior mental abilities. The thought to survive was the most important thought of the day, not anymore. Most of us have shelter, food on the table, and a place to sleep. Many of the earliest homo sapiens had to figure out how to survive on their own. There was no Google, no guns, no library, and no hospitals. Survival instincts evolved, and the curious mind of the homosapien lead us to where we are today.
One of my favorite stories in the book was the evolution of economics. We are all familiar with the barter system. An apple for an orange, even trade, right? Well, it depends on if you like apples or oranges, or if you have either one in your possession. You see, back in the day someone would trade their skills for something they couldn’t do. But things escalated, and a one for one trade wasn’t as easy anymore. What happens if I make sweaters, and you bake cookies. How many cookies do I get for one sweater? Twelve? Twenty? These types of questions lead to a new form of currency: gold. The soft, inedible, and useless material was coveted by the Spaniards. Long story short, gold became the currency that you traded with. You couldn’t do anything else with it, but it made it easier to exchange gold for your product, or skill. As gold became more popular, so did the exchange system. It made it easier for anyone to buy and sell goods. Voila, the economy was born thanks to a ‘useless’ shiny material.
We live in a fascinating environment — a microorganism smaller than a grain of dust can incorporate genetic codes from a completely different species into its cell. Then, it takes those powers and uses them to resist things like medicine, yet as far as we know, these organisms don’t have a consciousness, no goals or aspirations, and no ability to plan their next move. So how, and why, do these organisms continue to evolve?
The scientific revolution has allowed us to learn about things that just a hundred years ago would have been unfathomable to comprehend. Humans are pushing the limits every single day, still in awe of the question, why are we here? We just scraped the surface.
There are doctors in labs around the world that broke the natural selection process and are now engineering living species to their own specifications. For example, in 2000, there was a French scientist who planted a green fluorescent gene from a jelly fish into a white rabbit. Sure enough, the white rabbit turned a newly coated fluorescent green. This is intelligent design. Could it be the next revolution? What if you could replace your bad genes with good ones, what if you could pay for better hair, stronger legs, larger brains, what would happen? Who would be in control of the experiments? Could it go wrong? These questions are partly why the majority of people are against human engineering. Although, if you’re paying attention, it’s already happening. Maybe this is the final plateau, what if we could figure out how to live forever, would we want to? What if we figured out what is next, or what was before? All of this seems to be in our reach. Scientists are discovering new ways to tinker and one day, these experiments could allow us to do things we’ve only dreamed of.
My only wish is that in my lifetime, we find more answers. Living on this giant blue marble is fascinating alone but hearing how much we know of where we came from, and where we may be going, is breathtaking.
Should you read this book? Yes. Twice.
