Sapiens

On my way home last holiday season, I had some time to kill at the airport. Naturally, I gravitated towards the bookstore and started leafing through some recent bestsellers. I opened up a book and read one quick random passage that made my jaw drop. I flipped to another random page and read that entire page which had some incredible nuggets about humanity and life. I then proceeded to read that entire chapter at the bookstore and almost missed my flight because I lost track of time. I hurriedly bought the book, rushed to the gate, and boarded my flight.

That book was Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s a condensed look at human history that briefly details the big events and revolutions in the 70,000 or so years that humans have roamed the planet. It starts off talking about the early humans and how we were just a small species of animal living in some corner of Africa. One of my favorite snippets here was that when mankind evolved to stand upright on two legs, it caused dramatic changes in our early childhood development. Standing upright meant that womens’ hips weren’t as wide to hold a fetus in there for a long time, so the babies started coming out underdeveloped when they were born. Unlike a lion cub or a horse calf that could start hunting and galloping mere days after being born, human babies now took years of care and maintenance to get to a point where they could self-sustain themselves. This meant mothers had to spend a lot of time with children grooming and training them to be well-prepared for life, which over millenia led to a cultural stigma of women being delegated the role of caretaker. It blows my mind to think that gaining the ability to stand upright had a direct impact on women’s social development whose effects can still be felt today in the form of gender discrimination and the wage gap.

Soon after, humans started making tools, multiplied, and started traveling to far corners of the Earth. We made boats and sailed to Australia where we caused the largest genocide of animal species to date. Unlike the lions and giraffes of the African savannah, the species that man encountered in Australia didn’t evolve to react to Homo Sapiens, so these animals were no match for the tools and weapons that were unleashed upon them. They didn’t even recognize the bipedal humans as a threat when they first saw them. That’s crazy. No other species had spread so quickly to such vast corners of the Earth so fast that the native species had no chance to react. We caused the mass extinction of so many species simply by spreading around the planet and hunting game. During this whole time, many groups of Homo Sapiens wandered the planet, each with their own unique cultural and social dynamics so vastly different that it’s a crime to extrapolate any behaviors of one tribe and apply it to the general populous. In fact, there’s so little actual evidence of what humans really did in the era from ~70,000 to ~30,000 years ago that the book doesn’t even attempt to delve in any further here.

The book then goes on to document the Cognitive Revolution, where mankind was figuring out how to read and write, communicating in various languages with members of their tribe so that they could pass on their knowledge and learnings to future generations. My favorite mind-blowing moment here was learning about the quipu, the Incan writing system that wasn’t even a script at all. It involved tying strings into various types of knots, color-coded at specific lengths to denote information. These Andean cultures recorded entire poems, stories, and urban legends with this. What’s even crazier is that all this knowledge has been lost. No living person today knows how to “read” these knots or what they mean. Aside from this fascinating exception, most cultures used some form of hieroglyphic system primarily for record-keeping and tracking information. We weren’t quite yet in the era of documenting thoughts, feelings, or maintaining a blog.

Then came the Agricultural Revolution, which really caused a massive shift in the socio-dynamic structures of how we lived our lives. Different civilizations around the world quickly realized the potential of specializing in cultivating the crops that their region was suitable for growing, and thus they decided to go all in on those. These farms and fields required tons of maintenance and daily upkeep, so they pitched mud houses next to their fields and squatted there, sometimes for life. And thus was born the sedentary modern human. Until this point, nomadic tribes kept roaming from place to place in search of better food and simpler lives. With crops to plant and yields to harvest every season, Homo Sapiens needed to tend to their plants every year. So they just settled in one spot, and we still follow this behavior to this day. That’s how deeply it ingrained into the behaviors of human communities.

And finally, the Scientific Revolution happened. This was when mankind accepted its ignorance and acknowledged that it didn’t know everything about the world. Nations in Europe sent legions of explorers around the world in search of new horizons so that they would have new information about the world, and they knew very well that knowledge was power. They mapped entire coastlines and gave named whole landmasses, points of interest, isolated islands, and towering peaks. They invented tools and instruments to navigate the wide oceans in search of new frontiers, which firmly established England as the world’s leading naval force and eventually garnered it enough power to colonize over half the planet. The Scientific Revolution was tightly interlinked with empires, religion, and capitalism, all forces that greatly accelerated our ability as well as motivation to finance and discover knowledge that up until this point was inaccessible.

The book ends on a somewhat grim note about the age we’re entering, which is the Information Era. Technologies like the internet and artificial intelligence have so much power that Homo Sapiens can very easily end up destroying itself with this collective knowledge if it doesn’t stop and think about how to utilize it properly. Harari talks about how sci-fi visions usually portray current humans experiencing the emotions and feelings that we currently do but in a space-like setting with spaceships and laser guns. What if none of that happens but we end up augmenting ourselves with cyber implants and completely transform into a different species? What if we find a way for our collective consciousness to exist outside of our physical forms and simply “exist” in empty space? No-one predicted the advent of the internet fifty years ago. What’s stopping us from saying that our future will not involve space exploration and colonizing other planets like we currently like to fantasize about, but instead will see us transform ourselves into a new species and the definition of life itself into something completely different? The chapter on this broke my brain a little bit, and I had to re-read it to really understand where we could go from here.

There were a lot more interesting chapters sprinkled throughout as well, like how money became a thing simply because enough people agreed that it was valuable and we needed some kind of standard currency. A useful analogy I found here is how the book explained the value of gold. Say you don’t care about gold but your neighbor comes by asking for some. Now, you’re suddenly interested in gold because you having gold meant that you had something that your neighbor wanted. So now you valued gold, despite having no inherent interest in the metal but still wanting some so that if you do end up acquiring it, you could sell it to your neighbor who would pay you handsomely in something else you wanted. Multiply this effect a hundred times and gold is suddenly a valuable metal that everyone wants. There was also a good thought experiment at the end of this chapter about whether or not we would arrive at the concept of money the same way if we were to “reset” all of human history. It’s the one thing that every culture and country agrees upon, but would we have developed it in another version of this simulation solely due to the need for a standardized currency, or would we have found a different solution? We may never know.

I also really enjoyed the chapter on sexuality and how different cultures have tried to justify specific types of behavior but have no proper basis for any of their claims. The book uses homosexual intercourse as an example to hit home the idea of “Biology allows, culture forbids.” Natural selection allows the act of gay sex to be pleasurable and, for certain individuals, causes it to release the same chemicals in the brain as the ones released during heterosexual intercourse. Cultures are the ones that find it taboo and “unnatural.” Calling gay sex unnatural is begging to call into question the definition of “natural.” Spoiler alert: there is no proper definition for natural. The analogy used in the book is how wings evolved. Certain types of hopping insects developed enlarged skin folds as a random mutation that could absorb more sunlight. Over time, this larger surface area allowed for more sunlight to be absorbed into the body, so wings grew larger and larger. Eventually, the aerodynamics of these “skin flaps” allowed the hops to turn into glides, and species that flapped them could generate enough lift to gain altitude, avoiding predators by taking to the skies. The entire evolution of flight was a random mutation. So when someone says that being homosexual is “unnatural”, they are by definition claiming that birds flapping their wings across the sky is also an “unnatural” act, because nature never “designed” wings for the purpose of flight.

Another excellent chapter was the one on happiness. This blew my mind because today, the common rhetoric is that things have never been better in human history. Deaths in war are at an all time low, countries are so tightly interlinked by trade and commerce that the risk of war is the lowest it’s ever been, the arms race is stalled due to the threat of global nuclear annihilation, new treatments are being developed to let people live longer than ever, medications and cures are popping up for all kinds of diseases, and human life expectancy is better than it has ever been. Despite all this, are we happier? Do we lead more meaningful lives? We have more information now about the true history of our evolution, and we know that it happened by natural selection, not some intelligent design by an almighty creator. But that means we’re purposeless and our existence is meaningless. There was an entire section dedicated to talking about the power of imagined orders and how a collective belief in some higher power has led us to accomplish unbelievable feats as a species. Every time a new religion came along, it had to usurp the existing collective beliefs and convince large populations to buy that the new belief system (read: religious order) was better than the old one. But now that we have more information than ever, more people are choosing to admit that there is no higher power and that our existence has no purpose. Does that make us happier, or must we indulge in self-delusion to make our lives feel meaningful? I’ll just leave this with a quote from this section that I loved pondering over for an entire night: “A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.”

So yeah, I loved this book. It’s definitely a very pop-culture look at anthropology and sidesteps some areas of human history, but it examines certain big moments in great depth and brings up a lot of good hypotheticals about all the alternative ways in which things could have gone. If there’s one big thing I took away from this book, it’s the amount of randomness involved throughout all of our history and how seemingly simple things like a slight difference in temperature had a huge impact on the formation of entire nations and cultures, leading to the world we live in today. Harari also poses many great questions about human desire and where we’re going from here, because now that we’re gaining the ability to manipulate our own desires and thoughts, what is it that we want to want? We haven’t given our brains the required evolutionary time to properly deal with the world we find ourselves in today, so it’s going to be really crazy to see how things shape up in the next century or so. There are twenty or so Black Mirror episodes that could be made out of the scenarios I’ve got in my mind, and I can only hope that we go down the path of the least insane one.