Sapiens
Notes on the book Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind by Harari (Vintage, 2011). Summary from my prompted discussion with GPT, including its assessment of “status” for each theme.
1 Timelines
Potted Prehistory: From Apes to Sapiens
- ~7 million years ago — Last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lives in Africa.
- ~4–5 million years ago — Australopithecus emerges: upright-walking apes, still with small brains.
- ~2.5 million years ago — Genus Homo appears (e.g. Homo habilis): tool use begins, brains start growing.
- ~2 million years ago — Homo erectus spreads from Africa to Eurasia: first true global colonizer.
- ~1 million years ago — Controlled use of fire; cooking begins, enabling energy-rich diets and further brain growth.
- ~500,000–300,000 years ago — Multiple human species co-exist: Homo neanderthalensis (Europe), Homo denisova (Asia), Homo sapiens (Africa), others like Homo floresiensis (Indonesia).
- ~200,000 years ago — Anatomically modern Homo sapiens evolves in East Africa.
- ~100,000 years ago — Sapiens begin to spread beyond Africa, initially with limited success.
- ~70,000 years ago — The Cognitive Revolution: Sapiens begin showing evidence of complex language, symbolic thought, and cultural sophistication—enabling myths, planning, and large-group cooperation. → This is Harari’s chosen turning point: where history begins.
- ~60,000–50,000 years ago — Sapiens reach Australia via southeast Asia: likely the first major sea crossing. Many native species (megafauna) go extinct soon after.
- ~45,000 years ago — Sapiens enter Europe, displacing or absorbing Neanderthals.
- ~15,000–12,000 years ago — Sapiens cross into the Americas, likely via Beringia. Within a few thousand years, large animals (mammoths, sabre-toothed cats) vanish.
- ~10,000 years ago — Agricultural Revolution begins.
Spanish Conquest of the Americas (1492–1572)
- 1492 — Columbus lands in the West Indies (Bahamas, then Hispaniola), initiating sustained European contact with the Americas.
- 1493–1510s — Spanish establish brutal colonies in the Caribbean: Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico. Indigenous populations decimated by disease, slavery, and war.
- 1519–1521 — Hernán Cortés conquers the Aztec Empire (Mexico):
- Enters via the Yucatán, allies with discontented local tribes.
- Arrives at Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital.
- Captures Emperor Montezuma II (initially treated as a god).
- After retreating and regrouping, the Spanish return with more allies and destroy the city.
- 1532–1572 — Francisco Pizarro conquers the Inca Empire (Peru):
- Invades during a civil war between Incan brothers Atahualpa and Huáscar.
- Captures Atahualpa at Cajamarca under pretense of diplomacy.
- Despite a vast ransom in gold and silver, Atahualpa is executed.
- Spanish eventually take Cuzco, the Incan capital, and suppress remaining resistance.
- Key themes (Harari’s view):
- Technological asymmetry: steel weapons, gunpowder, horses, and sailing ships gave Spaniards a decisive edge.
- Biological warfare: European diseases (especially smallpox) spread faster than armies, killing millions before contact, see Section 5.3.
- Myth and ideology: Spaniards framed their conquest as a divine mission; Aztecs and Incas interpreted events through religious lenses.
- Asymmetry of knowledge: the Spanish had detailed intelligence on native empires—maps, interpreters, political analysis—thanks to prior explorers, traders, and indigenous informants. In contrast, the Aztecs and Incas knew virtually nothing about Europe—its geography, technology, ambitions, or worldview—until the Spanish were already upon them. This gave the Spanish a huge strategic advantage.
2 Themes
Cognitive Revolution
- Claim: Homo sapiens’ competitive edge comes from the capacity to create and believe in shared fictions—myths, gods, corporations, laws, nations.
- Implication: This enabled cooperation in groups larger than Dunbar’s number (~150).
- Status: Striking idea, hard to test historically. See Section 5.1.
Population Control in Forager Societies
- Claim: Foragers had low fertility rates (due to mobility, prolonged nursing, limited carrying capacity) and lived below their ecological ceiling.
- Implication: Higher standard of living than later farmers—better diet, less disease, more leisure.
- Status: Compelling and consequential if true, but lightly evidenced in the book. See Section 5.2.
Agricultural Revolution
- Claim: A trap, not progress. More food → population growth → more labor → worse health and more rigid social structures.
- Phrase: “History’s biggest fraud.”
- Implication: Human suffering increased with agriculture despite apparent progress.
- Status: Widely discussed by scholars, but often nuanced; Harari presents a stark version.
Unification of Humankind
- Claim: History has a direction: toward larger, more integrated systems.
- Drivers: Empires, money, and universal religions.
- Status: Broad trend is plausible, though details often gloss over resistance, complexity.
Religion
- Claims:
- Polytheism was more pluralistic and tolerant than later monotheisms. Gods had limited domains, didn’t demand exclusive worship, and made no special claims about humans being central to the universe.
- Monotheism, while outwardly unified, often functioned as de facto polytheism (e.g., saints, demons, the Trinity), and was more prone to intolerance due to its claim of exclusive truth.
- Religions evolve—they adapt their doctrines over time. Harari emphasizes that religions are not fixed systems but flexible, competitive, memetic structures that spread when they serve social or political ends.
- Implication: Religions serve primarily to facilitate social cohesion and hierarchy, not to uncover truth.
- Status: Insightful but overgeneralized. The sweeping treatment blurs distinctions between theology, practice, and institutional history.
Scientific Revolution
- Claim: Western science took off because it was willing to admit ignorance.
- Implication: Shift from “we know everything important” → “we don’t know, let’s find out.”
- Status: Oversimplifies non-Western intellectual traditions; good punchline, shaky thesis.
Capitalism, Science, and Empire
- Claim: These three forces supported each other.
- Empires provided resources and subjects.
- Capitalism funded exploration and war.
- Science benefited from imperial data and motives.
- Status: Historically grounded, but requires more case studies than he provides.
The State vs. Family
- Claim: The modern state has absorbed many roles once filled by the family (protection, social security, education).
- Implication: More reliance on anonymous institutions, less on kin.
- Status: Descriptive of modernity, but not unique to one region.
Modern Integration and Globalization
- Claim: The world has become a single economic and cultural system.
- Implication: Accelerated homogenization and mutual dependence.
- Status: Largely true, though uneven and resisted in many places.
Imperialism
- Claim: Empires spread knowledge, language, infrastructure, and sometimes prosperity.
- Tone: Strikes a contrarian, semi-defensive view of empire—acknowledging brutality but emphasizing legacy.
- Status: Highly controversial and under-argued.
Progress and Happiness
- Claim: Despite technological and social progress, humans may not be any happier.
- Corollary: Evolution doesn’t select for happiness; only survival and reproduction.
- Status: Big question, addressed mainly via anecdote.
The Future: Homo Deus
- Claim: We may be on the verge of engineering our own successors—cyborgs, AI, immortals.
- Implication: The humanist story may be ending; the future belongs to a post-human species.
- Status: Speculative.
Buddhism and Happiness
- Claim: Buddhism is distinctive in treating suffering as a mental phenomenon rather than a cosmic injustice or divine punishment. Its goal is to understand suffering and eliminate craving—not to reshape the world but to reinterpret experience.
- Contrast: Unlike theistic religions, Buddhism does not assume a creator god and focuses on inner transformation through mindfulness and detachment.
- Connection to Happiness:
- Harari distinguishes between objective living standards and subjective well-being.
- Suggests that modern humans are no happier than foragers because happiness depends less on external conditions and more on expectations, comparison, and neurochemistry (e.g., serotonin, dopamine).
- Buddhism offers one response: reduce craving, reduce suffering.
- Status: Harari is sympathetic to Buddhist psychology and presents it as more aligned with modern neuroscience than other religions. Again, fascinating, but lightly sourced.
3 Three Memorable Themes
Does Peugeot Exist?
- One of Harari’s most memorable examples is the legal existence of Peugeot, the French auto manufacturer. You can’t touch it or see it in a physical sense, yet it exists—registered in documents, enforced by laws, recognized by governments, markets, and consumers. In his telling, Peugeot is real because people believe in its reality and act accordingly.
- Harari uses this to reinforce his thesis that shared fictions underpin modern civilization. Corporations, just like gods or nations, exist because enough people behave as if they do.
- That said, he may underplay the informational substrate that anchors such fictions in practice. While Peugeot is not a building or a car, it is embodied in people, processes, and especially in data—patents, contracts, HR systems, supplier lists, branding strategies. These are not just stories—they are stored, updated, and acted upon.
- Interestingly, Harari seems to acknowledge this later when discussing tech giants like Facebook and the geopolitical importance of data sovereignty. There, he recognizes that modern fictions are also databases, and thus reside partly in people, partly in servers, and partly in algorithms. It feels like he didn’t fully connect the dots between the Peugeot metaphor and the digital infrastructure of belief.
- Emphasizes the fictional yet functional nature of institutions.
Money, Credit, andTrust in the Future
- Harari offers a striking summary: “What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future.” (emphasis added). This insight threads through his treatment of economic history—from early barter and commodity currencies to imperial coinage, paper money, and modern finance.
- The key idea is that money works not because it has intrinsic value, but because people believe others will accept it tomorrow. That shared belief is fragile but powerful. The transition to credit economies—banks lending based on expected repayment—requires deep cultural trust: in legal enforcement, in productivity, and in future stability (compare: rapid collapse of trade post-Roman empire).
- He aligns this view with the rise of capitalism, arguing that modern economies took off once people stopped believing that the past held all wisdom and began to trust that the future could be bigger and better.
- Again, this idea is compelling but underdeveloped. Harari doesn’t fully trace how different forms of money (e.g. fiat currency, digital assets) rely on different types of institutions and trust mechanisms. But the core point is sharp: money is one of our most successful and invisible shared fictions, one that organizes the modern world as effectively as any religion ever has.
Culture as a Mind Virus
- Harari describes culture not as a static tradition, but as a dynamic, self-replicating system—more like a parasitic organism than a tool created for human benefit.
- Drawing inspiration from Richard Dawkins’ concept of memes, he suggests that cultural ideas evolve by natural selection, not by conscious design. Those that survive and spread do so because they are good at reproducing themselves, not because they are good for us.
- This leads to the unsettling conclusion that many cultural norms, beliefs, and institutions—patriarchy, honor codes, caste systems, imperial religions—persist because they’re “fit” in memetic terms, even if they harm the individuals or societies that carry them.
- Harari pushes this analogy by suggesting that we don’t shape culture so much as culture shapes us, often hijacking our values, behaviors, and even identities for its own propagation.
- It’s a deliberately provocative framing, inviting readers to step back from the usual reverence for tradition and ask: who benefits from this idea? Us, or the meme itself?
- That said, this framing also flattens cultural nuance: not all traditions are oppressive, and not all cultural transmission is mindless. As a metaphor, it’s powerful—but like all metaphors, it distorts as well as reveals.
4 Two Anecdotes
Naming America
America is named after Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512), an Italian explorer and cartographer. Vespucci participated in several voyages to the New World around 1499–1502, sailing along the coast of South America. Crucially, he argued in letters that the lands discovered by Europeans were not part of Asia (as Columbus believed), but a “New World”—a separate continent. In 1507, a German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, published a world map in which he named the new continent “America”, using the Latinized version of Vespucci’s first name: Americus.
“I do not see what right anyone would have to object to calling this part… America, after Americus, its discoverer, a man of great ability.”
Waldseemüller later had doubts and removed the name from later maps—but by then it had stuck.
Moon Landing
On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface of the moon. In the months leading up to their expedition, the Apollo 11 astronauts trained in a remote moon-like desert in the western United States. The area is home to several Native American communities, and there is a story – or legend – describing an encounter between the astronauts and one of the locals. One day as they were training, the astronauts came across an old Native American. The man asked them what they were doing there. They replied that they were part of a research expedition that would shortly travel to explore the moon. When the old man heard that, he fell silent for a few moments, and then asked the astronauts if they could do him a favour.
‘What do you want?’ they asked.
‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘the people of my tribe believe that holy spirits live on the moon. I was wondering if you could pass an important message to them from my people.’
‘What’s the message?’ asked the astronauts.
The man uttered something in his tribal language, and then asked the astronauts to repeat it again and again until they had memorised it correctly.
‘What does it mean?’ asked the astronauts.
‘Oh, I cannot tell you. It’s a secret that only our tribe and the moon spirits are allowed to know.’ When they returned to their base, the astronauts searched and searched until they found someone who could speak the tribal language, and asked him to translate the secret message. When they repeated what they had memorised, the translator started to laugh uproariously. When he calmed down, the astronauts asked him what it meant. The man explained that the sentence they had memorised so carefully said, ‘Don’t believe a single word these people are telling you. They have come to steal your lands.’
Page 369 of the HarperCollins Kindle Edition.
5 GTP Generated Backup for Contentious Claims
Population Control in Forager Societies
One of the most striking arguments in Sapiens is that foragers may have enjoyed a higher quality of life than early farmers. Harari attributes this partly to the way population pressures played out differently before and after the Agricultural Revolution. While farming societies grew rapidly and became locked in a subsistence trap—more food leading to more people, but not better living standards—hunter-gatherer populations remained small and relatively stable. This wasn’t because their environments couldn’t support more people, but because various constraints held their numbers below ecological carrying capacity.
The most important of these constraints was mobility. Forager societies had to move frequently, and carrying more than one dependent infant made that difficult. As a result, they practiced long birth spacing—often breastfeeding for three to four years—which naturally suppressed fertility. Ethnographic studies of recent hunter-gatherers (such as the !Kung San and Hadza) confirm this pattern: women typically had four to five children over their lifetimes, spaced far apart, and infant mortality was high enough that population growth was close to zero.
Mobility also interacted with cultural factors. Some groups practiced infanticide or abortion when resources were scarce, and territorial boundaries were strictly maintained. Groups could not easily expand their ranges, both for ecological reasons and because neighboring bands defended their own territories. In effect, both social and biological pressures kept population growth in check.
The archaeological evidence supports this picture. Skeletal remains from pre-agricultural humans are often taller and show fewer signs of malnutrition, disease, and physical stress than those of early farmers. This suggests that foragers regularly lived with a margin of spare resources—if they had been living at the edge of starvation, we’d expect to see more stunting and chronic illness. Moreover, global population estimates suggest that the total number of humans prior to agriculture remained under 10 million for tens of thousands of years.
In contrast, agriculture allowed for food storage and sedentary life, which removed the mobility constraint and permitted shorter birth intervals. Populations began to grow rapidly, and while total food output increased, so did the number of mouths to feed. Health outcomes generally declined: early farmers were shorter, more disease-prone, and worked harder. This phenomenon is widely known in anthropology and demography as the “Neolithic demographic transition”—a surge in population that did not improve, and in many ways worsened, the well-being of the average person.
Harari presents this view in a simplified form, but it reflects a well-supported thesis in academic research. Anthropologists such as Richard Lee, Kristen Hawkes, and Michael Gurven have studied the mechanisms of fertility restraint in forager societies, while paleodemographers like Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel and Clark Larsen have documented the health impacts of the agricultural transition. Economists like Gregory Clark have extended the same logic into the historical period, arguing that until very recently, humanity remained trapped in a Malthusian cycle: technological improvements increased food supply, but population growth ensured that living standards did not rise.
The idea that hunter-gatherers were affluent—not in material goods, but in health, leisure, and ecological balance—was first popularized in the 1960s by Marshall Sahlins. Recent archaeological and ethnographic evidence has largely reinforced that view. What Harari adds is a compelling narrative that connects it to the broader sweep of human history.
References
- Lee, Richard B. The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge University Press, 1979. Landmark ethnographic study of a modern foraging society with detailed demographic and nutritional data.
- Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. Aldine, 1972. Introduced the provocative idea of the “original affluent society” among foragers—affluent in time and health, not goods.
- Bocquet-Appel, Jean-Pierre. “When the World’s Population Took Off: The Springboard of the Neolithic Demographic Transition.” Science 333, no. 6042 (2011): 560–561. Paleodemographic analysis showing the massive population growth triggered by agriculture.
- Larsen, Clark Spencer. “The Agricultural Revolution as Environmental Catastrophe: Implications for Health and Lifestyle in the Holocene.” Quaternary International 150, no. 1 (2006): 12–20. Synthesizes skeletal evidence of declining health with the adoption of farming.
- Marlowe, Frank W. “Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 14, no. 2 (2005): 54–67. Explains reproductive strategies, mobility constraints, and risk management in forager life history.
- Kaplan, Hill, Lancaster, and Hurtado. “A Theory of Human Life History Evolution: Diet, Intelligence, and Longevity.” Evolutionary Anthropology 9 (2000): 156–185. Explores why foragers evolved long lifespans and lower fertility—emphasizing skill acquisition and parental investment.
- Clark, Gregory. A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton University Press, 2007. Argues that the agricultural and industrial revolutions did not initially improve living standards, echoing Harari’s framing.
Biological warfare
Disease epidemics following European contact in the Americas were nothing short of catastrophic. Scholars estimate that between 80% and 95% of the Indigenous population died in the first 150 years of colonial contact—primarily from diseases like smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus (Wikipedia). In some regions, the decline was even more abrupt: the island of Hispaniola lost up to 90% of its Taino population within a few decades (The New Yorker and Wikipedia).
In Central Mexico, a 1520 smallpox epidemic ravaged Tenochtitlán. Contemporary sources and modern estimates suggest mortality rates ranged from 25% to over 50%, with some accounts putting the fall in population from over 30 million pre-conquest to 1.5–3 million by the late 1500s (Wikipedia). Similar patterns were seen in the Maya region: some communities lost 50–95% of their population, with estimates of 88% mortality near Lake Petén Itzá during early colonial rule (Wikipedia).
In North America, the pattern was equally devastating. Epidemics—sometimes reaching 90% mortality—erased entire tribes or depopulated vast regions, contributing to colonial myths that the continent was “empty” (Wikipedia).
These statistics aren’t easy to pin down precisely. Indigenous demographic data before contact remains uncertain—estimates of pre-Columbian populations range broadly from 50 million to over 100 million, placing post-contact deaths at tens of millions (Wikipedia).
Nonetheless, the consensus is clear: these epidemics were virgin-soil events, with Indigenous populations having no prior immunity. The rapid, invisible spread of pathogens like smallpox decimated societies long before most European colonists even arrived or understood what was happening (The New Yorker).