Sapiens Book Club Part 2: The Agricultural Revolution
In part one of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, we followed Homo sapiens (Sapiens) through prehistory from its origins on the African savannah through its proliferation across Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas, extinguishing, along its path to global conquest, Neanderthals and other sibling species as well as many species of megafauna such as the marsupial lion in Australia and the giant ground sloth once found in the Americas.
Harari begins part two of Sapiens with humans growing tired of the nomadic life. It’s been a busy couple of million years of evolving and conquering, and what they think they’d really like to do now is set their spears aside and settle down somewhere. So they do that.
It was in the Middle East around 9500 B.C. when humans took up farming, specifically with the domestication of wheat. In a fun twist however,Harari proposes that, in a world where evolutionary success is measured by the number of copies of DNA of a given species, what actually occurred was the domestication of Sapiens by the wheat.
Wheat, Harari proposes, used humans to launch itself from being a rather anonymous wild grass to one of the most ubiquitous and successful (in evolutionary terms) plants in the earth’s history. He illustrates how wheat, over the course of time, used Sapiens, manipulating them into clearing the land, tilling and weeding the soil, and guarding the fields from rodents and other pests
“We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word 'domesticate’ comes from the Latin ‘domus’, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.” p. 91
The Luxury Trap
Sapiens didn’t foresee the downstream consequences of adopting farming as a way of life. Sure, we were well fed. Cultivating wheat and other crops provided us with more food, and as a result we multiplied exponentially. This, as previously indicated, made us successful as a species, but for the individuals, Harari tells us, it was a trap. The unforeseen population growth, our dependence upon limited sources of food, and the surge in infectious diseases that grew out of domesticated life all led to more work for Sapiens.
It’s a trap we still step willingly into when we commit ourselves to careers we hope will afford us the luxury of early retirement only to later find ourselves with children, mortgages, car payments, and other commitments that — far from freeing us from the yoke of the proverbial ploughshare — demands even more work from us. This Harari calls the luxury trap:
“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.” p. 98
The Evolution of the Human Brain
Sapiens’ transition, over the course of a few millennia, from a hunting and gathering lifestyle to one of farming significantly changed the course of humanity, and it also changed the human psyche. We went from a nomadic existence in which we lived expansively across hundreds of square miles to a contained existence in which each family worked small fields or orchards and centered their entire domestic lives within small stone or wooden domiciles.
We perceived ourselves as having dominion over these “artificial human islands,” and within them we separated ourselves from those around us, shifting our worldview ever so gradually inward over the course of time to that of much more self-centered beings.
Another way in which Sapiens’ psyche transmuted over the course of the Agricultural Revolution had to do with their perception of and relationship with the future. As hunter-gatherers, we lived hand to mouth, with little need for long-term planning in meeting subsistence needs. By contrast, farmers are hyper-attentive to the future as they plan specific cycles of cultivation and harvest and time these with the seasons. As our ancestors transitioned from a nomadic lifestyle to a farming existence, they necessarily evolved to consider the future as they never had previously.
The Advent of Writing
Writing was another invention during the Agricultural Revolution that transformed the human brain. There were no systems of writing prior to the fourth century B.C. The brains of our hunter-gatherer forbears evolved to remember everything they needed to know. But with the advent of complex societies, a new kind of information became vital for Sapiens to retain — numerical information.
So, sometime during the fourth century B.C., the Sumerians invented a “partial script,” that allowed for the storage of numerical information outside of the human brain. About a thousand years later, this evolved into a full script called Cuneiform that allowed for the retention of all kinds of information.
However, Harari points out that simply being able to retain information was only the first piece of the puzzle. The people of these ancient civilizations also had to evolve ways of cataloguing, retrieving, and processing information that, over time, changed our brains:, causing us to think like clerks and accountants.
“The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: It has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalization and bureaucracy.” p. 146
Even Bigger Imagined Orders
The Agricultural Revolution catalyzed exponential population growth, and over the course of a few millennia, human settlements expanded from small villages of a few hundred individuals to empires of millions. In part one of the book, Harari explains how the ability to believe in shared myths or imagined orders allowed Sapiens to cooperate within tribes of hundreds. Would we be able to do the same to facilitate cooperation within the mega-empires of the first century, B.C.? The answer is yes.
“When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands, and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links. While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail’s pace, the human imagination was building outstanding networks of mass cooperation unlike any other ever seen on earth.” p. 115
Harari suggests that cooperation may be an overly optimistic description for how this looked and that oppression, exploitation, and inequality were more accurate representations of what some of the subjects of these metropolises experienced. Nevertheless, as he illustrates, imagined orders such as the Code of Hammurabi in ancient Babylon and the Declaration of Independence of the colonial United States were among the shared myths that, despite the ways in which they divided people into unequal hierarchies, helped to sustain these cultures.
In our next installment, we see how money, empires, and religion unify the globe:
Sapiens Book Club: Part Three, The Unification of Humankind
Stay tuned.