Book review of Sapiens: brief history of humankind

1. BOOK REVIEW OF SAPIENS: A BRIEF
HISTORY OF HUMANKIND
- YUVAL NOAH HARARI
Group Members-
Dhruv Patel(17BCH011)
Payal Raghuvanshi(17BCH037)
Saloni Solanki(17BCH047)
Bhautik Thesiya(17BCH053)

2. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian and a professor in the Department
of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of the
popular science bestsellers Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014),
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), and 21 Lessons for the
21st Century (2018). His writings examine free will, consciousness,
intelligence and happiness.

3. BOOK REVIEW
• Human history has been shaped by three major revolutions: the Cognitive
Revolution (70,000 years ago), the Agricultural Revolution (10,000 years ago),
and the Scientific Revolution (500 years ago). These revolutions have
empowered humans to do something no other form of life has done, which
is to create and connect around ideas that do not physically exist.

4. • The first is the cognitive revolution which means a genetic mutation that
altered the inner wiring of Homo sapiens, enabling them to think in
unparalled ways and to communicate in an altogether new type of
language which could not only conveyed information but also created
imagined worlds.
• It was ability to forge common myths that that helped homo sapiens to
cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Similarly, Harari says, it was by
building pyramids – in the mind as much as on the ground; imagined
orders and hierarchies – that humanity advanced

5. • According to Harari, Agricultural Revolution promotes population growth
for Sapiens but it made the lives of most individuals and animals
worse than they had been when Sapiens were mostly hunter-gatherers,
since their diet and daily lives became significantly less varied.
• About the unification of humankind, Harari argues that over the trend for
Sapiens has increasingly been towards political and economic
interdependence. Harari argues that money, empires, and universal religions
are the principal drivers of this process.

6. • For Harari, History is largely made up of accidents; and his real theme of
the book is the price that the planet and its other inhabitants have paid
for humankind’s triumphant progress.
• This is was indicated in an relative 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.
• His perception sees modern agriculture’s treatment of animals as one of
the worst crimes in history and also doubts whether extraordinary material
advances have made peoples any much happier than they were in the past,
and regards modern capitalism as an ugly prison.

7. PERSONAL VIEWS
• Sapiens, the book, takes us on a breath-taking ride through our entire human
history, from its evolutionary roots to the age of capitalism and genetic engineering,
to uncover why we are the way we are.
• Sapiens focuses on key processes that shaped humankind and the world around it,
such as the advent of agriculture, the creation of money, the spread of religion and
the rise of the nation state. Unlike other books of its kind, Sapiens takes a multi-
disciplinary approach that bridges the gaps between history, biology, philosophy and
economics in a way never done before. Furthermore, taking both the macro and the
micro view, Sapiens conveys not only what happened and why, but also how it felt
for individuals.

8. THANK YOU