This fascinating book was written by a young Oxford historian. He breaks human history down to three different eras, delineated by cognitive, agrarian and scientific revolutions. While discussing the early ability of homo sapiens to speak and organize, he makes a breathtaking observation. He states that it is extremely hard to control more than 150 people in a group at a time. It is fiction that enables "large numbers of strangers to cooperate successfully by believing in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination." "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings." The author also posits that the life of the hunter-gatherer was pretty good, and more interesting and healthier than most of what has followed. The foragers had diverse diets, were extremely fit and had an abundance of free time.
After two-and-a-half millennia of gathering and hunting, in about 9500 BC humans began to manipulate the lives of a few plants and animals. Today, 90% of what we eat comes from a handful of plants domesticated in that era: rice, wheat, corn and the potato. The species flourished because it could multiply faster in a settled environment over a foraging one. By creating food surpluses, humankind established an environment in which kings, soldiers, priests, and thinkers made history. Harari suggests that while the elites were making history, they enslaved and suppressed the vast majority of the human race. Furthermore, a more compact living space shared with domesticated animals led to greater illnesses and disease than the hunter-gatherers experienced. The necessary tool for the elites to organize society was introduced by the Sumerians in the fourth millennium BC. The first writings appeared and helped the elites to organize societies that were quite substantial, peaking with the Romans who ruled millions and were organized enough to collect taxes and maintain a public polity that ruled the vast Mediterranean basin and beyond. Money was another step in the process of allowing large societies to function smoothly by establishing universal means of exchange. Perhaps the two most important unifiers that came later were empires and religion. "Commerce, empires and universal religions eventually brought virtually every sapiens on every continent into the global world we live in today."
The third revolution began in Europe about 500 years ago. Explorations of science led to the industrial revolution and the extraordinary transformation of life in the last two hundred years. In less than a century-and-a-half, mankind developed methods of mechanical propulsion that took us from a steam propelled railroad to an Atlas booster to the moon. Along the way, we have changed the planet, not for the better, and replaced the family and the local community with the state and the marketplace. Since 1945, the various states of the world have provided us with a peaceful seven decades, quite unlike anything in humankind's past. Today, Homo Sapiens is breaking out of its biologically determined limits and moving toward intelligent design. Scientists are now creating life in laboratories. Whereto? Only time will tell as we approach an almost godlike capacity to change the physiology of mankind.
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