Why men are not hardwired to be the dominant sex

In his new book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari challenges many of our assumptions about evolution, history and men - he talks to Chris Moss

Yuval Noah Hararil
Yuval Noah Hararil: '“Transsexuals are the vanguard of the future. But sex-change operations and Viagra are just appetizers' Credit: Photo: Richard Stanton

The myth that man is not only unique but, by virtue of his sophisticated language, multifarious power and extraordinary intelligence, also supreme underpins all the others – the ones that fill our lives with religion, literature, romantic love and politics.

Sapiens, a new book by Yuval Noah Harari of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, sets out to challenge this central assumption and to question the human society it has helped served to create. From the first, the book positions human history where it belongs – as the latest phase in an epic process that has been, for the most part, defined by physics, chemistry and biology.

Contrary to those stirring museum displays and Fat Boy Slim videos, we are not the end result of a neat cycle of evolution from apes to apish dimwits to amazing us. For almost two million years we shared the planet with Neanderthals – aka Homo neanderthalensis – and other members of our Homo genus, including Homo erectus, Homo rudolfensis and the possible human sub species Denisova hominins, the bones of which were found in 2010.

Dr Harari carries out an interesting thought experiment: what if Neanderthals and other Homo species had survived alongside us?

“Would the American Declaration of Independence hold as a self-evident truth that all members of the genus Homo are created equal? Would Karl Marx have urged workers of all species to unite?”

More mundanely, imagine Sapiens hooligans meeting Neanderthals at a football match, or a boxing match, or if you accidentally kicked sand in the face of a fellow homo whose only notable weakness was that he doesn’t speak your very complex language. But don’t despair: between one and four per cent of your DNA is Neanderthal DNA, so you can at least have a go.

Sapiens, argues Harari, became an apex predator by sacrificing brawn to brain and using his bonce to outwit physically stronger human species as well as fast, ferocious carnivorous beasts. This led, around 70,000 years ago to what Harari calls a “Cognitive Revolution” – when we began to employ those same neurons to create boats, weapons, artwork and needles. Our rise, unlike that of, say, sharks, crocodiles or polar bears, took place within a mere blip in terms of prehistory and history.

“This spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences… humans failed to adjust. Most top predators are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.”

When it comes to gender – a topic as muddy as the primeval swamp – Dr Harari applies the same sort of scrutiny. Pub psychologists and journalists love to recycle a small but very handy set of myths about how and why men have the best jobs, highest salaries, and fastest cars. These usually take the form of variations of these old faves: we hunted, while women gathered. Men’s brains follow their penises. We rose to power through brute strength and/or aggression. Men competed for partners in order to reproduce; the keener competitor won.

Harari gallops through these - the book is breezily populist – and finds plenty of holes in them all. Some of the science compels us to rethink such received ideas. For example, men often simply aren’t stronger, and women are often more resistant to hunger, fatigue and disease. Also, weedy politicians boss beefy cleaners and barmen around the House of Commons – physical strength is in fact very rarely related to social power.

Aggression, too, has a tenuous link with authority. Managing a war, for instance, requires great tact and guile, and the ability to manage and cooperate. “Women are often stereotyped as better manipulators and appeasers than men, and are famed for their superior ability to see things from the perspective of others,” says Dr Harari. This, he suggests, should make them natural leaders and bosses.

Not addressed in detail in Sapiens, but oft-stated, and politicised, in modern times, is the notion that men have dominated women because women have had to invest much time and effort in childcare, while they have been free to pursue and accumulate wealth and power.

“I don’t find this very convincing,” says Harari. “Though there is no doubt that women throughout history had to invest much more time and effort in childcare, in my mind it is not so obvious why this should have made them socially and politically weaker than men.

“Being the main caretaker means that you have more incentive to forge ties with other people, that you are more concerned to insure social harmony and adequate food-supply, and that you have more to lose from wars and plagues. Arguably, a mother of three should therefore be far more interested in politics than a carefree male bachelor.

“We are used to the separation of the political sphere from "domestic" issues, but this is a result of patriarchy. It is not a law of nature that such a separation must exist. In bonobo society, for example, bonobo females are also the main caretakers of children, yet precisely because of that, they are politically dominant.”

Straight attitudes to gay men are another puzzle, especially when it takes the form of homophobia.

“From an evolutionary perspective, straight men should have a great liking for gay men,” says Dr Harai. “If I am a straight man, and I discover that one of the other men in my group is gay, I should be very happy and give him all the encouragement he needs. Because if he has sex only with men, this means there is less competition for the women, and my genes are more likely to spread around. Why then are many straight men homophobic? From an evolutionary perspective, it is a mystery.”

Noah Yuval Harari freely, indeed happily, admits – in the book, and in conversation – that while he sees many flaws in the widely accepted assumptions and stereotypes, it’s not easy to offer final answers. He sees Sapiens as an almost childlike book of wonder, questioning the big shapes and patterns in life. “I didn’t aim to give a survey of facts and names and dates, but rather, to decipher the deeper mechanisms of history. To understand how our reality came to be the way it is.”

In doing so, he has knocked on the head a lot of our laziest ideas, and does a service to the causes of feminism in the process. Gender, he deeply believes, is solely a construct and our very notion of maleness not only can be, but will be, changed by new attitudes and new science, and very soon.

“Transsexuals are the vanguard of the future. But sex-change operations and Viagra are just appetizers. New technologies, particularly direct brain-computer interfaces that give you access to unlimited worlds of experience, might transform sex and gender roles into a product like any other. You can be a straight man for breakfast, a straight woman for lunch, and be gay in time for dinner. And at night you could be something new altogether, which today we cannot even imagine.”

Oh, and if you’re stuck for a hearty laugh-along sex and gender subject for tonight’s session with your more monkeyish mates, then consider this: somewhere along the line, we got those Neanderthal genes when your granddad (give or take a few thousand greats) slept with a short but very strong mono-browed Homo neanderthalenis woman who he probably couldn’t even talk to properly.

“It is shocking – or perhaps thrilling – to think that we Sapiens can have children together with animals from a different species,” says Dr Harari. “Follow-up studies are trying to find out who exactly had sex with whom. Did Sapiens girls have a liking to Neanderthal boys, or was it the other way around?”

Then again, after a few pints of saliva-fermented berry juice, who’s looking?

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari is published by Harvill Secker, £25