1: An Animal of No Significance
From Harari—Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Harari wastes no time in jumping from the big bang to the origin of Homo Sapiens in the first few paragraphs. In the following sections, he talks about a variety of species in the Homo genus in addition to Sapiens, including the well-known Neanderthals. He explains common theories of how many of these appeared on Earth at the same time, and how evolution was not linear at all.
Harari says that other human species such as Neanderthals and Denisovans eventually vanished, with one possibility that Sapiens pushing them to extinction. He questions what our society would be like if these other species survived. What would politics be like? How would religions be different? It’s a very interesting thought experiment since Sapiens have just started to pull itself out of mutual destruction in the past century after millennia where war was the norm. Would it have taken even longer to reach where we are at today? Or is it just evolutionarily and societally impossible for the Earth to support multiple human species at steady state? His question also reminds me of the fictional worlds of Star Wars and Star Trek, where different humanoid intelligent species co-exist (frequent wars being part of the fictional plots notwithstanding) in the greater cosmos. That is a future world that is a possibility for our reality. But interestingly, 50,000 years ago on Earth, we already had multiple different human species co-existing. It just didn’t last. We can look to the past to see why we essentially killed each other, with one Homo species emerging victorious.
Harari also talks about other evolutionary drivers and how they impacted the development of the Homo genus and Sapiens specifically. I’m guessing these are all fairly popular if not highly accepted theories in the field. One point that did catch my attention was that humans are born underdeveloped, compared with other animals, allowing us to be educated and socialized more. That’s extremely interesting to me. Per my learning in different places (and just appealing to logic), biological evolution is extremely slow. Significant traits and abilities are acquired on the timescale of many tens and hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. However, collective human learning can easily be formalized, codified, and institutionalized within decades, and passed on to each successive generation. Since human babies are born “underdeveloped”, it allows us to fill them up with the collective intelligence of humankind, as it were. This is much more efficient than biological evolution. And thus other animals which do not have this ability (at this point in our Earth’s history at least) are increasingly left behind compared to humans. I’m certain many folks in the field have studied and analyzed this phenomenon, and probably is at least part of Harari’s newest book that looks forward into the future and predicts how humans will develop. (I haven’t read that book yet.)
