Modern humans are descended from beings who emerged in East Africa two and a half million years ago. As they travelled to other parts of the world our ancestors developed different traits and became Homo Sapiens. In his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, traces the historic evolution of humans from apes to the future possibility of an engineered people whose DNA has been altered.
Our conversation has been edited for length.
You talk about human evolution through the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution and the Scientific Revolution. What do you mean by the Cognitive Revolution?
It is the appearance of a new skill, the communication between individuals, that turned Homo sapiens from being an insignificant ape into the most powerful animal on the planet. The power of Homo sapiens does not come from something superior in our body or brains. It comes from our ability to co-operate flexibly in large numbers.
We are the only animal that can do so. There are animals such as wolves that can cooperate flexibly but in small numbers. They have to know each other in order to co-operate.
Vocal communication is pretty common in the animal kingdom. It’s not the technical ability to produce a variety of sounds. Homo sapiens use language to create new realities, realities that don’t exist anywhere except in the stories we invent and tell one another. When you say “If you do this, God will be angry, it’s not the same as saying a wolf is coming.” We speak about nations, or money or human rights. It’s not like animals communicating about lions or food.
Scientists believe climate change was responsible for the extinction of pre-historic animals, but you say it was humans who were to blame; you say we are “ecological serial killers.” That’s a pretty damning.
Even if climate had something to do with it, humans were also a crucial factor. If it was only climate change, big animals would have survived because they survived for millions of years despite climate change.
We have archaeological evidence that 12,000 years ago extinction of animals had something to do with humans. We find that wherever people migrated the mammoths disappeared. If they disappeared because of climate change how did they survive on small islands near Siberia and Alaska?
Mammoths survived on these islands for thousands of years after they became extinct on the mainland. When humans came over to the islands, mammoths disappeared.
In America the giant sloth disappeared, but it survived in Cuba long after and only became extinct when humans arrived. This doesn’t fit the theory that climate change was responsible.
When you discuss the Agricultural Revolution you say plants domesticated Homo sapiens. Usually we think of it in reverse.
We tend to view history from the vantage point of Homo sapiens and think we are the agents and heroes of everything revolving around ourselves. There is a lot of debate about what drove the Agricultural Revolution. This isn’t an original idea of mine but we can understand Agricultural Revolution better if we look at it from the view point of plants.
Agriculture really was a mistake because it made it harder for man to live, not easier. After the Agricultural Revolution, the peasant’s life became considerably worse than that of the hunter-gatherer.
Agriculture was not suited to our bodies and minds. Our adaptation was to hunt and gather, to climb trees, to pick mushrooms, run after rabbits and things like that. Not digging canals and grinding corn and other back breaking tasks.
We find skeletons after the Agricultural Revolution (of people) who have died from lack of nutrition and disease and physical deformities. There are also the social costs of agriculture which creates a much higher level of inequality in society, between classes and gender. This is hard to square with the idea that the Agricultural Revolution was a big human advancement.
In your book you suggest the modern economy has “been growing like a hormone-soused teenager.”
If you look at modern economic history, the most salient feature is the exponential growth of the economy. Growth has become the central value of the capitalist ideology.
People today are obsessed with growth. Everybody wants their income to grow. People talk about investment, how can I invest my money so that each year I can have three per cent more?
The thing that frightens everyone is zero economic growth.
But you use the expression ‘a hormone-soused teenager.’ That makes it sound wild.
It is wild. The down side is the destabilizing of the ecological equilibrium. Over the past 500 years, the human economy has been growing in an exponential way, but the cost is ecological degradation.
We have been witnessing, over the last 100 years, a series of continuing ecological catastrophes which have completely changed the planet.
If you think about wolves, think about Germany, the land of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. How many wolves are in Germany today? The answer is less than one hundred. In comparison there are about five million domesticated dogs.
Our future sounds scary. You note the U.S. Department of Defense is trying to interpret how our brains work and which human beings are angry or hateful. There is also the question of genetically altered DNA, already used in agriculture.
The realistic approach is to acknowledge that we are probably one of the last generations of Homo sapiens. We still have grandchildren but I am not so sure our grandchildren will have grandchildren. I don’t think there will be Homo sapiens in 200 years.
It is not that we will destroy ourselves in a nuclear war. But we will use technology to transform ourselves into a very different kind of being. It’s not only genetic engineering, it is other technologies like direct brain interfaces, which may enable humans and computers to merge into cyborgs.
This is not science fiction. Look at how humans are becoming inseparable from mobile phones and other applications. You have more and more devices attached to the body or implanted in the body.
You have a photograph in your book of two people with bionic arms shaking hands.
They move their arms by thought. This is a medical breakthrough. Medicine always starts with fixing problems and then it goes to upgrading. In the 20th century the main mission of the medical profession was to heal the sick.
In the 21st century the same medicine used to heal the sick can be upgraded to change the healthy into super humans.
In a century you will look back and realize we are not Homo sapiens, even more different from ourselves than Neanderthals or chimpanzees. Evolution, natural selection, is being replaced by Intelligent Design.
What is the most important point you want to make in your book?
The gap between power and happiness. We are thousands of times more powerful than our ancestors. But if you look at it from the viewpoint of our ancestors it isn’t clear that we are a thousand times happier than they were.
It is the most important and disturbing lesson of history. Especially in the 21st century as we gain more power. It isn’t clear that all this power will make the world a happier place.
