Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - podcast

Science Weekly Series
Ian Sample meets the historian Yuval Noah Harari to discuss his international bestseller, in which he suggests we'd have been better off without agriculture, and puts our species' dominance down to our ability to fantasise

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This week on Science Weekly with Ian Sample we meet historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically acclaimed book Sapiens.

Yuval talks about the genesis of this ambitious book, which follows our species from its inception to global domination, and projects into a future where, thanks to synthetic biology and computers, we are destined to become a new cyborg-like species.

Along the way he outlines some provocative ideas about Homo sapiens, including the emergence of agriculture as a profound mistake and that our ability to fantasise has been the key to our evolutionary success.

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