Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Book cover of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
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| Author | Yuval Harari |
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| Original title | קיצור תולדות האנושות |
| Country | Israel |
| Language | Hebrew |
| Subject | History, Human evolution |
| Publisher | Harper |
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Publication date
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2014 |
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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Hebrew: קיצור תולדות האנושות) is a book by Professor Yuval Noah Harari first published in Hebrew in Israel in 2011, and in English in 2014. Harari cites Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) as one of the greatest inspirations for the book by showing that it was possible to "ask very big questions and answer them scientifically".
Harari's work situates its account of human history within a framework provided by the natural sciences, particularly evolutionary biology: he sees biology as setting the boundaries of human activity, and culture as shaping what happens within those bounds. History is the account of cultural change.
Harari surveys the history of humankind from the evolution of archaic human species in the Stone Age up to the twenty-first century, focusing on our own species of human, Homo sapiens. He divides the history of Sapiens into four major parts:
Harari's main argument is that Sapiens came to dominate the world because it is the only animal that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. He argues that prehistoric Sapiens was a key cause of the extinction of other human species such as the Neanderthals, along with numerous other megafauna. He further argues that the ability of Sapiens to cooperate in large numbers arises from its unique ability to believe in things existing purely in the imagination, such as gods, nations, money and human rights. Harari claims that all large-scale human cooperation systems – including religions, political structures, trade networks and legal institutions – owe their emergence to Sapiens's distinctive cognitive capacity for fiction. Accordingly, Harari reads money as a system of mutual trust and sees political and economic systems as more or less identical with religions.
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