Sapiens

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

In the winter of 1928, a French archaeologist named Henri de Lumley was examining bones at a site in southern France when he found something that did not fit the timeline he had been taught. He found cut marks on the bones of a Neanderthal, made with stone tools. The pattern was consistent with defleshing -- the deliberate removal of flesh from a corpse. Whether it indicated cannibalism, ritual burial, or something else entirely, no one could say. But it confirmed that the creatures who left those bones were not simple animals following instinct. They were doing something deliberate and strange, something that involved treating a dead body as meaningful.

Decades later, Yuval Noah Harari would cite precisely this kind of evidence in a book that would sell 25 million copies globally: Homo sapiens was not the only creature on earth who behaved in ways that implied something beyond immediate survival. But we were the creature who took that tendency to a scale and complexity that no other species ever reached. Harari's argument -- the central thesis of *Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind* -- is that the gap between us and every other animal, including our close relatives the Neanderthals, was not a gap of anatomy or brain size. It was a gap of fiction. We could tell stories about things that did not exist. They, apparently, could not. And that gap was enough to produce everything: agriculture, empire, religion, money, science, and the prospect of our own self-engineered replacement.

*Sapiens* was published in Hebrew in 2011 and in English in 2014 by Harper. Harari is an Israeli historian at Hebrew University Jerusalem, where he teaches today. His PhD from Oxford was in medieval military history -- a detail worth noting, because the book ranges from 300,000 years ago to speculations about 2200, and the quality of his analysis varies significantly depending on how far he is from his actual expertise. Bill Gates recommended the book. Barack Obama called it thought-provoking. Mark Zuckerberg made it a club pick. It was translated into over 65 languages. It became the kind of book that people display prominently and reference in conversations about anything.