In February, Israeli archaeologists uncovered the well-preserved remains of two Copper Age houses in northern Jerusalem, the oldest such discovery in the vicinity. “The fascinating flint finds attest to the livelihood of the local population in prehistoric times,” said Ronit Lupo, the Israeli excavation chief.
It thus appears that, even 7,000 years ago, our ancestors were developing technology, trading goods and services, and devoting time and energy to ensuring sustenance.
The Jerusalem dig lay just up the road from Hebrew University, where the historian Yuval Noah Harari continues to absorb well-deserved accolades for Sapiens, his broad survey of how humanity evolved—and didn’t—from prehistoric to contemporary times. All are justified. He covers lots of ground, and his trenchant, if sometimes tendentious, prose renders the journey enjoyable and rewarding.
Harari has seen his book—originally written in Hebrew, capably rendered into English by the author himself (with assistance), and now translated into more than 30 languages—attain a kind of cult status, becoming an irrepressible topic of conversation among historians, lay and professional, as well as archaeologists, economists, and evolutionary biologists alike. He begins by exploring the origins of our species itself, which “conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language.” While many creatures, including other human species such as Neanderthals, were able to communicate the basic information necessary to survive, Sapiens spawned sophisticated linguistic tools that empowered us to attain transcendent levels of organizational ability. By concocting what Harari calls collective fictions — such as religions, nations, countries, even corporations — our ancestors enabled themselves to “cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers.”
Common adherence to such fictions taxes our imaginative faculties by requiring something of a suspension of disbelief. And such fictions are not necessarily dishonest or untrue; for instance, Harari argues, “no one was lying when, in 2011, the UN demanded that the Libyan government respect the human rights of its citizens, even though the UN, Libya and human rights are all figments of our fertile imaginations.” Figments or not, these concepts fueled our domination of the prehistoric world. Harari suggests that “when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.”
Harari also examines Sapiens’ exploration of the outer world, including America and Australia—and its beneficial and detrimental results, including the extinction of 23 species of megafauna, such as 450-pound kangaroos, marsupial lions, and 2.5-ton wombats. “The moment the first hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach,” he asserts, “was the moment that Homo sapiens climbed to the top rung in the food chain on a particular landmass and thereafter became the deadliest species in the annals of planet Earth.”
In general, Harari enjoins us not to “believe tree huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions.” In his provocative description of Sapiens’ transition to agriculture from hunting and gathering, Harari insists that “on the whole, foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, laborers, and office clerks who followed in their footsteps.” For instance, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a much more varied diet than farmers, who generally subsisted off the single crop they grew, be it wheat, rice, or maize. Moreover, foragers labored for shorter hours, fewer times per week, and at more interesting and diverse tasks than their peasant descendants.
Calling the Agricultural Revolution “history’s biggest fraud,” Harari indicts the farming lifestyle for inflicting immeasurable pain and suffering on individual humans, even if it did benefit the species as a whole by “enabl[ing] Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.” He chronicles how, around 9000 b.c., foragers gradually and almost by accident developed techniques for cultivating the wild seeds and plants they had hitherto taken for granted. By the time they were done, a few centuries later, “a series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying water buckets under a scorching sun.”
The advent of farming laid a firm foundation for history as we know it, as the overwhelming majority of peasants labored to produce surpluses for an elite few. As Harari memorably puts it, “food surpluses fuelled politics, wars, art and philosophy. They built palaces, forts, monuments and temples. . . . History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.” Harari also takes a hatchet to the “authenticity” of cultures, noting the short-term memory that afflicts such concepts. We consider Irish potatoes, Indian chiles, Italian tomatoes, Swiss chocolate, and Argentine steaks to be authentic ethnic ingredients when, in fact, each was imported to its respective country within the last 500 years.
In an illuminating chapter on the particularly important and domineering social fiction of money, Harari posits that “trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted . . . the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.” It is striking that cultures as divergent as the Chinese, Spaniards, and Muslims all put their faith, so to speak, in gold—a universal convention if ever there were one. As Harari observes, while religion “asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.”
He also considers the seminal historical role played by empires, which he neither jeers nor cheers, sanguinely noting instead that “a significant proportion of humanity’s cultural achievements owe their existence to the exploitation of conquered populations.” But while empires occasionally exploit ethno-racial fissures, the successful ones have “recognized the basic unity of the entire world, the existence of a single set of principles governing all places and times, and the mutual responsibilities of all human beings.” What Harari calls cultural diversity and territorial flexibility form the cornerstone of the imperial project; they’re what allowed groups ranging from the Arabs to the Romans to the Zulus to co-opt and unify their erstwhile cultural and ethnic adversaries.
How, then, did the Western European empires manage so thoroughly to dominate the world, beginning half-a-millennium ago? Harari posits that their harnessing of science and capitalism to unquenchable curiosity empowered, first, discovery and, then, domination: “What made Europeans exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer.”
The 15th-century Ming admiral Zheng He, for instance, dispatched massive armadas across a radius of many thousands of miles, stretching from East Africa to Indonesia. But Admiral He never coupled scientific inquiry to his travels, nor did his Chinese supervisors fully support his expeditions, which were eventually scuttled. By contrast, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and British explorers marshaled a unique combination of military, scientific, and economic power in the service of crown and country.
Religion, too, receives tough but fair treatment, the paradigmatic social fiction that enables societies to cohere. Harari locates faith at the intersection of human norms and values, on the one hand, and a belief in superhuman order, on the other. He lumps communism into this definition because it “believed in a superhuman order or natural and immutable laws that should guide human actions.”
Some of Harari’s criticisms are overwrought. He claims that the contemporary yen to explore the world is “not a reflection of some independent desire but rather of an ardent belief in the myths of romantic consumerism.” He apparently devalues the importance of widening one’s horizons through foreign travel, even as he exalts the same goal when it comes to studying history. He also dubiously claims that “the leading project of the Scientific Revolution is to give humankind eternal life.” Well, this may be the goal of some scientists, but others have for centuries sought largely to enhance human life, whether through technological advances that make life more affordable or through medical breakthroughs that make it less painful. At the same time, others strive to improve and extend life for the biosphere in general, not just for humanity.
And while Harari rightly discerns that worldly, even venal, motives often underlie scientific inquiry, he overstates his case when he asserts that “most scientific studies are funded because somebody believes they can help attain some political, economic or religious goal.” Into which of those categories fits basic cancer or AIDS research or, for that matter, funding for astronomy? Harari’s subsequent claim that “scientific research can flourish only in alliance with some religion or ideology” seems worthier of French poststructuralism than Israeli historicalism.
And what of humanity today? Harari unapologetically records how good we have it, by and large, relative to our ancestors: Abundant energy, stable borders, domestic tranquility, international comity, ample food. Contemporary Sapiens is developing fluorescent rabbits and bionic arms, resurrecting extinct species like the woolly mammoth, and introducing personalized medicine.
But ecological dangers lurk, nuclear weapons loom, ethnic and religious strife persist, and who knows what havoc artificial intelligence may wreak? We also “feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives.” As Harari reminds us, we’re just like our Copper Age forefathers, only more so.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel.
