Yuval Noah Harari, in his ambitious book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, states that humans were, in the beginning, rather insignificant. Just another member of the great apes family scraping out a meager living on the African savannah, our ancestors seemed no more likely to “walk on the moon, split the atom, [or] fathom the genetic code” than bonobos or chimpanzees.
In fact, when we first meet our ancestors, we find that they are but one of many species belonging to the genus Homo (man). Humans evolved in East Africa from an earlier ape called Australopithecus about 2.5 million years ago and over the course of time ventured into the wide world, evolving into distinct species.
To our ancestors, scientists have not so humbly bestowed the name Homo sapiens (“wise man”), but we were far from the only humans. In Europe and Asia were Homo neanderthalensis (“Man from the Neander Valley”); in East Asia were found Homo erectus (“upright man”), and so on.
Homo erectus, Neanderthals… I’d learned these names of course, but I had the mistaken impression that these were earlier forms of humans - more like parents and grandparents than siblings. I’d thought each had been a linear progression to the next, ie: that Homo erectus had evolved from Neanderthals, and that Homo sapiens (referred to hereafter as Sapiens) had evolved from Homo erectus. Not so, says Harari. As with foxes or bears, there were, from about two million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, several species of humans roaming the earth simultaneously. So what happened?
It turns out we killed them all.
Sapiens: The Cognitive Revolution and Myth-Making
About 70,000 years ago, Sapiens - our ancestors - left Africa and proceeded to overrun the Eurasian continent which, at the time, had already been settled by some of the aforementioned other human species, with whom Sapiens competed for resources and proceeded to exterminate, evidently thanks to cognitive abilities that were found lacking in our human brothers and sisters.
Harari attributes Sapiens’ competitive success specifically to having developed cognition and language abilities that allowed them to think and speak about things that do not exist - myths, social constructs, or imagined realities that are agreed upon collectively. Gods and other deities would be examples of such shared fictions, but so are nations, businesses, and money. They exist because we collectively agree that they do.
“The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation.” Page 42
Sapiens’ ability to conceive of and speak about these shared fictions facilitated the unprecedented ability to cooperate in large numbers and thereby snuff out competitors who had no such ability. The Neanderthals didn’t even see us coming.
Hunter-Gatherers Had it Made
Harari calls our hunter-gatherer ancestors “the original affluent society,.” They worked roughly three to six hours each day foraging - picking berries, digging roots, stalking rabbits - and maybe spent a day hunting bison and mammoth. Compare that to the work week of your average cubicle dweller, factory worker, or retail employee.
Hunter-gatherers lived long lives in comparison with those of their agrarian descendants, and Harari attributes this longevity to their comparatively varied diet. He tells us that “foragers may have eaten berries and mushrooms for breakfast; fruits, snails and turtle for lunch; and rabbit steak with wild onions for dinner,” while their successors, who adopted farming as a way of life, subsisted largely on a single staple crop such as wheat, potatoes, or rice.
Also, thanks to their nomadic lifestyle and lack of domesticated animals, our forager forbears suffered less from diseases than those who lived in the often unhygienic settlements of agrarian and industrial societies that followed.
Sapiens Conquers Australia
Having spread throughout the Eurasian continent, some Sapiens communities had evidently put down roots in Indonesia, forming fishing villages there, some of the earliest permanent settlements, and it was from these settlements that Sapiens turned an eye toward nearby Australia. How they made the transition from terrestrial animals to seafarers and why they set out for Australia (They’d heard about the surfing?) is unknown, but we do know that 45,000 years ago Sapiens became the first humans to set foot on the Australian continent..
Australia, for its part, had, for millions of years, thrived in the absence of humans, evolving all manner of creatures not found in other parts of the world. These included a giant (two-meter tall) kangaroo, a marsupial lion, dragon-like lizards, and a two-and-a-half-ton wombat called a diprotodon. In conquering Australia, humans completely transformed the continent’s ecosystem, obliterating these animals, and 21 other species of megafauna.
Sapiens in America: Stone Cold Ecological Killers
It turns out that, despite what I learned in elementary school, Columbus didn't discover America. Hearty Sapiens explorers from the Arctic beat him to this continent by about 15,492 years. It was during the ice age that Sapiens traveled on foot from Siberia to Alaska across the Bering land bridge — slowly at first and then later, around 12,000 B.C. when global warming melted some of the ice, en masse. Large groups of Siberians poured down into the Americas and within two millennia settled the continents as far as Tierra del Fuego, an island on South America’s southern tip.
Mammoths, mastodons, native horses, camels, saber-toothed lions, giant ground sloths, and thousands of other species were wiped out in the taking of America. Harari calls Sapiens’ migration across the planet “one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom,” dubbing Sapiens “ecological serial killers.”
“At the time of the cognitive revolution, the planet was home to 200 genera (plural of genus) of large, terrestrial mammals weighing over 100 pounds. At the time of the agricultural revolution, only about a hundred remain. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools.”
In driving home how humans are by far the deadliest animal on the planet, Harari recounts how this mass extinction played out repeatedly in miniature whenever we set foot on a new land mass, most recently on such islands as Madagascar, the Solomon Islands, and the Galapagos.
Following the second wave mass extinction of the agricultural revolution, we are now, he warns, in the middle of the third wave mass extinction, resulting from the industrial revolution, and that, unless we change our course, many of the ocean dwellers will meet the same fate as the mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and ground sloths.
What will humans think of next? Find out in our next installment, Sapiens Book Club: Part Two, the Agricultural Revolution.
Human evolution is a fairly interesting topic and I agree upon the fiction part, even money is fiction - it actually has no value, it is just a worthless peice of paper but because we beleive in money we use it and trade it for other goods. I would like to reccomend Homo deus and 21 lessons for the 21st century, if you liked sapiens