4: The Flood
From Harari — Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
This is the last chapter in part 1. The Cognitive Revolution. To put ourselves a bit in time axis, we are now in between 70,000 years ago (the beginning of the cognitive revolution) and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of agriculture revolution). Chapter 3 talks about the life of foragers, the author continues his writing style, on one side challenges archeological biases in the course of constructing the life of then foragers, on the other, encourages the continual quest of human history. The author, concludes the chapter by emphasize the importance of asking question even though we may not have answer in the end to those.
The whole of chapter 4 centers on the interactions of homo sapiens interactions with the planet, our mother Earth, especially focusing on the negative side of the interactions. The ecological serial killers, our ancestors, termed by the author, started wave and wave of “massacre”, leading to extinction of large amount of living species. In today’s terms, the biodiversity was severely narrowed. The origin of the ecological destruction was that our ancestors started to be capable of reaching much further away from the their home, the Afro-Asia landmass. Eventually, the wave of extinction arrived at Samoa and Tonga (1200 BC); the Marquis Islands (AD 1); Easter Island, the Cook Islands and Hawaii (AD 500) and New Zealand (AD 1200). The author further hinted that this wave was just the First Wave Extinction, the Second Wave and the Third Wave were attributed to the agricultural and industrial activities.
Chapter 4 start with a description of the colonization of Australia 45,000 years ago. Since the homo sapien stepped on Australia, they started to transform the continent. It sounds scary that 23 out of 24 bulky Australian animal species (> 50 kg) were gone within a few thousand years along with numerous small species. The author then mentioned that some scholars attribute the ecological disaster to climate change, and he appears to disagree those assertions by counter-arguing with a number of reasons. After Australia, came America. The author continues to blame homo sapiens as the killers. The land bridge between north-eastern Siberia and north-west Alaska formed as the sea level were low enough. So… the ecological tragedy repeated there. Some 200 terrestrial animal species (> 50 kg) were reduced to about 100 at the Agricultural revolution.
After going through chapter 4, we know that more disasters are coming, not just to the animal and plant kingdom, but to humankind ourselves. Our Earth is unarguably getting warmer and warmer, climate scientists and ecologists have been issued warning for long time. Is our planet habitable in 1000 years, 500 or 100 ? If the current trend continues, what would happen to our next and next generations? Or how many more generations of humankind would survive? We need to reflect on our relationship with the planet, our home. What happened from history could be a mirror, if not a crystal ball, for human being to learn from, even though you may not be completely convinced that our ancestors are “killers”, however at least I hope you agree with me that we have been emitting too much CO2.
