Rover Castelijn
Filosofie Essay
16/11/2018
Sapiens
A Brief History Of Human Mankind
“About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics.” This is how Dr. Yuval Noah Harari starts his version on the history of the world. Harari has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford and now lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in World History. His research focuses on broad questions, such as: What is the relation between history and biology? Is there justice history? Did people became happier as the history unfolded?
The book itself is divided into 4 parts, Part One: The Cognitive Revolution, Part Two: The Agricultural Revolution, Part Three: The Unification of Humankind and Part Four: The Scientific Revolution.
So, in Part One he focusses on the Cognitive Revolution, he starts to explain the simple history of the world with one important matter; that 3.8 billion years ago, on planet Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology. About 70.000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started even more elaborate structures called cultures. The development of these human cultures throughout time is called history. That is the point where Harari mentions biology and history together, which is a huge focus throughout the whole book. He states that the most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than for example gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish. According to Harari chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, to explain in a simple matter: just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.
We are used to thinking about ourselves as the only humans, but actually once upon a time we had a significant number of siblings. For example, the Homo Neanderthalis and the Homo Erectus.
A big thing he discusses in the Part One of the book is when the Homo Sapiens (originally from East Africa) landed in Arabia, most of Eurasia was already settled by other humans. What happened to them? Then he further goes on to explain two well respected theories in science. The first one called The Interbreeding Theory, which tells a story of attraction, sex and mingling: as the Homo Sapiens spread around Eurasia they bred with other human populations and the people we are today are the outcome of this interbreeding.
The second theory, The Replacement Theory tells a very different story: according to this theory, Sapiens and the other species of human couldn’t get along very well and didn’t have any sexual interest in each other; they could not even produce a child together if they wanted to. So these populations remained completely separated and when the Neanderthals died out, or got killed, there genes died with them. So according to the Replacement theory we are all ‘pure Sapiens’. This theory was busted in 2010 when scientists were able to publish a map of the Neanderthal genome. It turned out that 1-4% of out DNA is Neanderthal DNA. As a result Harari suggests some sort of mingle of the two theories: the Sapiens conquered and killed all of the Neanderthals, except 1 or 2 who joined the Sapiens. That explains the DNA question.
But how were the Homo Sapiens so powerful? According to Harari Homo Sapiens conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping because Homo Sapiens is primarily a social animal. But the most unique feature of the Sapiens language is their ability to speak about fictions. Harari goes on about this subject quite long, but in short he believes that our ability to have religions (which is speaking about fictions) resulted in us being able to have extremely large societies.