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sapiens yuval harari review
The skull of an early Homo sapiens: what led to the sudden evolution of our thought processes? Photograph: B Christopher / Alamy/Alamy
The skull of an early Homo sapiens: what led to the sudden evolution of our thought processes? Photograph: B Christopher / Alamy/Alamy

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind review – thrilling story, dark message

This article is more than 9 years old
Yuval Noah Harari’s account of how we conquered the Earth astonishes with its scope and imagination

Where do we come from? Our insatiable curiosity about our origins has provoked a raft of different answers to that question. Was the invention of cooking the reason for man’s evolutionary success or was our facility for culture the key? Was the progress of humanity driven by kindness; or by warfare and aggression? Did our earliest ancestors live in promiscuous communes, as depicted in Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s bestselling Sex at Dawn? Or in respectable monogamy, as argued in Lynn Saxon’s less successful Sex at Dusk? One of the charms of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is that it avoids such simplistic explanations. Instead, it offers a bravura retelling of the human story seasoned with more personal reflections on man’s tenancy of the planet. The book’s surface is brilliantly clear, witty and erudite but its underlying message is dark.

Harari organises humankind around four different milestones. About 70,000 years ago, the cognitive revolution kickstarted our history, and about 12,000 years ago the agricultural revolution speeded it up. Then came a long process of unifying mankind and colonising the Earth until, finally, the scientific revolution began about 500 years ago. It is still in progress and may yet finish us all off.

The first of these – the cognitive revolution – was the real game-changer; a genetic mutation that altered the inner wiring of Homo sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate in an altogether new type of language which could not only convey information but also create imagined worlds. It was this ability to forge common myths that enabled H sapiens to cooperate flexibly in large numbers, and thus to see off rivals such as the Neanderthals, wipe out hostile animals and cultivate crops. Similarly, says Harari, it was by building pyramids – in the mind as much as on the ground; imagined orders and hierarchies – that humanity advanced.

If Sapiens is at its best in the early chapters, when the scarcity of evidence gives full scope to Harari’s audacious imagination and gift for exposition, it remains consistently fresh and lively as it advances into the historical era, which it interprets in terms of three potentially universal orders – money, empire and religion. Harari is a brilliant populariser: a ruthless synthesiser; a master storyteller unafraid to stage old set pieces such as Cortés and Moctezuma; and an entertainer constantly enlivening his tale with chatty asides and modern parallels.

The philosophy that emerges, however, is not what you’d necessarily expect from an Israeli with a background in medieval military history. History, for Harari, is largely made up of accidents; and his real theme is the price that the planet and its other inhabitants have paid for humankind’s triumphant progress. There are indicators of this in an elegiac passage on the destruction of the megafauna of Australasia and South America and a rapturous account of the life of Buddha, but it is only when he reaches the modern era that Harari brings his own views to the fore. He sees modern agriculture’s treatment of animals as one of the worst crimes in history, doubts whether our extraordinary material advances have made us any happier than we were in the past, and regards modern capitalism as an ugly prison. What is more, current developments in biology may soon lead to the replacement of H sapiens by completely different beings, enjoying godlike qualities and abilities.

It takes broad brushstrokes to cover a vast canvas and, inevitably, some of the paintwork is a little rough. Occasionally Harari makes it all too simple and sounds like a primary school teacher being cute. He defers too much to current orthodoxies – the discussion of patriarchy resists the logic of its own arguments for fear of affronting feminists – and reflects current academic fashion by, for example, hugely overstating the role of science in European colonialism. Napoleon may have taken 165 scholars with him when he invaded Egypt but the scramble for Africa later in the century was more about machine guns, searchlights and metallurgy.

That said, Sapiens is one of those rare books that lives up to the publisher’s blurb. It really is thrilling and breath-taking; it actually does question our basic narrative of the world.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is published by Harvill Secker (£25). Click here to buy it for £18.99 with free UK p&p

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