The book review provides a summary of Yuval Noah Harari's book "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" in 3 paragraphs. It discusses how the book divides human history into 4 major parts, from the cognitive revolution to the scientific revolution. It highlights an interesting story in the book about the evolution of economics and the development of currency. It concludes that the book is informative but could have explored its questions in more depth rather than just raising many questions without fully answering them.

1. Book review
Name: Aman Gupta
Roll number: 17BCH014

2. Preface about the book
Harari's work situates its account of human history within a framework provided by the natural sciences,
particularly evolutionary biology, evolutionary anthropology, and evolutionary psychology: he sees biology as setting
the limits of possibility for human activity, and sees culture as shaping what happens within those bounds. The
academic discipline of history is the account of cultural change.
Harari surveys the history of humankind from the evolution of archaic human species in the Stone Age up to the
twenty-first century, focusing on Homo sapiens. He divides the history of Sapiens into four major parts:
• The Cognitive Revolution (c. 70,000 BCE, when Sapiens evolved imagination).
• The Agricultural Revolution (c. 10,000 BCE, the development of agriculture).
• The unification of humankind (the gradual consolidation of human political organizations towards one global
empire).
• The Scientific Revolution (c. 1500 CE, the emergence of objective science).

3. About Author
Yuval Noah Harari (born 24 February 1976) 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.
on the modern world and his far-sighted analysis of what we are doing to
ourselves struck many chords with me.

4. My Review
The author takes you on an educational ride, full of stories I wish
they taught in school. I’ll skip through some of the facts and take us
back to 70 thousand years ago where organisms belonging to homo
sapiens started to form more elaborate structures, called cultures.
When cultures began to blossom, this was the beginning of history
and marked the first time that what happened in the past became
important. Many believe there were three important revolutions that
shaped history: cognitive, agricultural, and scientific.

5. The cognitive revolution was thought to have started around 70 thousand years
ago, the agricultural revolution was around 12 thousand years ago, and the
scientific revolution has just started (500 years ago). Collective knowledge
amongst humans today is far greater than it was hundreds of years ago, but our
ancient ancestors may have had slightly larger brains and far superior mental
abilities.
The thought to survive was the most important thought of the day, not anymore.
Most of us have shelter, food on the table, and a place to sleep. Many of the
earliest homo sapiens had to figure out how to survive on their own. There was no
Google, no guns, no library, and no hospitals. Survival instincts evolved, and the
curious mind of the homosapien lead us to where we are today.

6. One of my favorite stories in the book was the evolution of economics. We are all familiar with the barter system.
An apple for an orange, even trade, right? Well, it depends on if you like apples or oranges, or if you have either
one in your possession. You see, back in the day someone would trade their skills for something they couldn’t do.
But things escalated, and a one for one trade wasn’t as easy anymore. What happens if I make sweaters, and you
bake cookies. How many cookies do I get for one sweater? Twelve? Twenty? These types of questions lead to a
new form of currency: gold. The soft, inedible, and useless material was coveted by the Spaniards. Long story
short, gold became the currency that you traded with. You couldn’t do anything else with it, but it made it easier
to exchange gold for your product, or skill. As gold became more popular, so did the exchange system. It made it
easier for anyone to buy and sell goods. Voila, the economy was born thanks to a ‘useless’ shiny material.
We live in a fascinating environment — a microorganism smaller than a grain of dust can incorporate genetic
codes from a completely different species into its cell. Then, it takes those powers and uses them to resist things
like medicine, yet as far as we know, these organisms don’t have a consciousness, no goals or aspirations, and no
ability to plan their next move.

7. The scientific revolution has allowed us to learn about things that just a hundred years ago would have been
unfathomable to comprehend. Humans are pushing the limits every single day, still in awe of the question, why
are we here? We just scraped the surface.
There are doctors in labs around the world that broke the natural selection process and are now engineering
living species to their own specifications. For example, in 2000, there was a French scientist who planted a green
fluorescent gene from a jelly fish into a white rabbit. Sure enough, the white rabbit turned a newly coated
fluorescent green. This is intelligent design. Could it be the next revolution? What if you could replace your bad
genes with good ones, what if you could pay for better hair, stronger legs, larger brains, what would happen?
Who would be in control of the experiments? Could it go wrong? These questions are partly why the majority of
people are against human engineering.

8. Scientists are discovering new ways to tinker and one day, these experiments could allow us to do things we’ve only
dreamed of.
My only wish is that in my lifetime, we find more answers. Living on this giant blue marble is fascinating alone but
hearing how much we know of where we came from, and where we may be going, is breathtaking.
Harari hates "modern liberal culture", but his attack is a caricature and it boomerangs back at him. Liberal humanism,
he says, "is a religion". It "does not deny the existence of God"; "all humanists worship humanity"; "a huge gulf is
opening between the tenets of liberal humanism and the latest findings of the life sciences". This is silly. It's also sad to
see the great Adam Smith drafted in once again as the apostle of greed. Still, Harari is probably right that "only a
criminal buys a house … by handing over a suitcase of banknotes" – a point that acquires piquancy when one considers
that about 35% of all purchases at the high end of the London housing market are currently being paid in cash.

9. In short, Sapiens serves as an interesting introduction to general history and human nature. Harari introduces
numerous ideas, and even though they are rarely new or innovative, they are well-explained. It is a very
informative and challenging book in some respects, but does not live up to its true potential. Harari asks a lot of
questions, but does not even come close to answering them all. One could argue that that is precisely every good
historian’s job, but I found that it resulted in a work filled with tons of information about everything but nothing
in particular. Additionally, from a literary point of view, Harari’s writing might be clear and fluent, but it is not
particularly lyrical, beautiful or expressive. After all, he is a scientist, and that is certainly noticeable in his
factual, concise writing style.
Sapiens is a book with an enormous potential, but the truly interesting part of the discussion seems to be lost in
some kind of political correctness. Therefore, I did not find it exact or challenging enough to be worth all the
praise it has received from readers across the globe.
“The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans,” Harari writes, “is that they were
insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or
jellyfish.”
In Review