A brief History of Humankind - Sapiens – by Yuval Noah Harari.

Sapiens – by Yuval Noah Harari.


The book gives few interesting insights that demystifies few questions pertaining to our habits.
Why, for example we humans gorge on high-calorie food that is doing little good to our bodies? Today’s affluent societies are in the throes of plague of obesity, which is rapidly spreading to the developing countries. It’s a puzzle why we binge on the sweetest and the greasiest food we can find, until we consider the eating habits of our forager forebears.

One simple answer is, “We like the taste!” According to Yuval Harari, the reason is deep rooted in the genes that our ancestors, the Homo sapiens thousands of years ago had. Most of our habits that are because of less self-control are because of the hunter gatherer world that shaped us, the world that we subconsciously still inhibit.

In the savannahs and forests they inhabited, high calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply. A typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of sweet food – ripe fruit. If a Stone Age woman came across a tree groaning with figs, the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot, before the local baboon band picked the tree bare. Today we may be living in high – rise apartments with over stuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we are in Savannah. That’s what makes us spoon down an entire tub of Ben and Jerry’s when we find one in the freezer and wash it down with jumbo coke.

  The other surprising point that the Author states is, “Agricultural Revolution was the biggest fraud in our history!”

 For 2.5 million years Humans fed themselves by gathering plants and hunting animals that lived and bred without their intervention. All this changed about 10,000- 12000 years ago when sapiens began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of few animal and plant species. The transition to agriculture began around 9500 – 8500 BC in the hill country of south-eastern Turkey, Western Iran and the Levant. Wheat and Goats were domesticated by 9000 BC, Peas and Lentils around 8000 BC, Olive trees by 5000 BC, Horses by 4000 BC and Grapevines in 3500 BC. Some animals like camels and cashew nuts were domesticated even later. But by 3500 BC the main wave of domestication was over.

Even today with all our advanced technologies, more than 90% of the calories that feed the humanity come from handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9500 – 3500 BC- Wheat, Rice and Maize, Potatoes, millet and barley. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine is that of ancient farmers. 

As Humans were able to decipher nature’s secret, they cheerfully abandoned the grueling, dangerous and often Spartan life of hunter- gathering, settling down to enjoy the pleasant satiated life of farmers. 

Farmers worked harder, had less free time and spent their time in less stimulating ways. The work of farmers took a toll on their knees, spines and necks which had evolved for chasing gazelles and climbing trees, not for clearing fields and digging canals. Moreover the grain - heavy diet was less healthy than the varied diet of the hunter –gatherers. The farmers had fear of unfavorable weather conditions and also the insects and wild animals spoiling the farm. They lied in more cramped conditions that exposed them to more diseases such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution.

They worked for political masters who took a portion of what they harvested while providing a little in return. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments such as slipped discs, Arthritis and hernias.

The currency of evolution was neither hunger nor pain. It was the copies of DNA helixes. Just as working capital is more important than the happiness of the employees for a business to be successful the success of species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA. Fear of extinction increases with reduced rate of DNA. Humans managed to collect more food per unit area and thus the overall population multiplied exponentially. This is the essence of agricultural revolution; the ability to keep more humans alive under worse conditions.  Moreover the agriculture demanded lot of time and hence farmers were forced to permanently settle beside their wheat fields. This completely changed the life of Humans. The farmers did not domesticate Wheat, it was the other way round.

  A quick Flashback…

About 13.5 billion years ago Matter, energy, Time and Space came into being in what is known to us as Big Bang. Physics alone ruled for about 3 lakh years after which matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures called atoms, which then combined into molecules. Physics in company of Chemistry stayed for long time and 3.8 billion years ago on our planet Earth, certain molecules combined to form organisms. For around 2.5 bn years we had only multicellular life. 600 million years ago came small animals (Insects). 2.5 mn years ago we noticed the appearance of Homo.  The first human ancestors appeared between 5mn and 7mn years ago. Modern Humans were evolved 2.5 mn years ago. Out of the six major species of humans, Neanderthals (Men from Neander valley) were the bulkiest and muscular. Even a Neanderthal woman could whup Arnold Schwarzenegger. One of our species Homo floresiensis could reach a maximum height of one meter and could not cross weight beyond 25kgs. The sapiens of this era had average brain size of 600 cc, when mammals weighing 60kg had a brain size of 200cc. Modern sapiens had the average brain size very close to the engine size of Honda City, 1200 – 1400 cc.

Homo sapiens wiped out the Neanderthals: “They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.” The last dwarf species of humans died out 12,000 years ago. Homo sapiens conquered the world because of their unique language. The Cognitive Revolution occurred between 70,000 to 30,000 years ago. It allowed Homo sapiens to communicate at a level never seen before in language.

According to the interbreeding theory, when sapiens spread into Neanderthal lands, sapiens bred with them until the two populations merged. Hence todays Eurasians are not pure sapiens. Similarly when Sapiens reached East Asia, they interbred with the local Erectus, so Chinese and the Koreans are a mixture of sapiens and erectus. The progress of Physics, Chemistry and Biology got extended and 70000 years ago Homo sapiens started cultures.

 The cognitive revolution

The development of Homo sapiens switched to the faster gear ever since the language came in their communication. Why did Homo sapiens suddenly flood the planet when our ancestors didn’t do so, after millions of years? Harari attributes it to our language–we’re the only species that can imagine and communicate about things that don’t exist. An ape may be able to communicate to another ape that there’s a lion by the river, but only a Sapien can imagine and convey that the lion is the guardian spirit of his tribe. This frees us up to invent philosophies, religions, trade networks, and political institutions, without being limited to our genetic evolution or current environment. Our myths and common beliefs—e.g. God, imperial glory, human rights—also allow us to get large numbers of strangers to work together in ways that other species can’t.

The truly unique feature of our language, when it got developed was not just its ability to transmit information about lion threats or food locations but also to transmit information about things that did not exit. This gave a direction to the curiosity and a high degree push to Human development.

 The unification of mankind:

The three key unifiers were Money, Religion and Empires.

 Money:

In a barter economy, every day the shoemaker and the apple grower needed to learn anew relative price of dozens of commodities. If one hundred different commodities were traded in the market, then buyers and sellers needed to know 4,950 different exchange rates (99 x 100/2). And if 1,000 different commodities are traded, buyers and sellers must juggle 499,500 different exchange rates!(999 x 1000/2.)
 How do you figure out the transaction and then justify the exchange? It was tough to calculate the number of apples equivalent to the number of shoes, which equal how many times hair cut from a barber?
Money came into practice around 3000 B.C. in the sumer, an ancient region of SW Asia in present – day Iraq. The currency was Sumerian barley grains. It appeared in Sumer at the same time and place under the same circumstances, in which writing appeared. This kind of money wasn’t easy to store and transport. To overcome these limitations, Silver shakel, an 8.33gms of silver piece appeared in the middle of the third millennium in the ancient Mesopotamia.
Humans realized two facts related to the use of money. (i) Universal convertibility (ii) Universal trust.
In a trade if a person ran out of coins, the person trading with him ran out of trust. Though money developed economic trust, it was with lot of other cultural sacrifices. Human started moving towards professionalism. This was a big shift in the culture and practice. The creation of money was purely an intellectual revolution. It doesn't exist except in our minds. More than 90 % of all money in the world is just digital, not physical money. Even today with the 80 trillion dollar world income per year, $72 trn value is not actual money but just exchanging one record to the other. The other bitter truth is that everyone always wants money precisely because everyone else always wants money.

 Religion

  Religion is the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires. The Agricultural Revolution was accompanied by a Religious Revolution. Interestingly, polytheism is more open and accepting of multiple beliefs even though we often look at it as more barbarian and uneducated than our current beliefs. The central tension with monotheism is how to deal with the fact that there is evil in the world while the omnipotent God is believed to be good and caring. If God is good why would he allow evil things to happen? Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied. .
Though farmers had ownership and the control over the farms, trees and their sheep, but they started understanding that the control was limited. Humans knew that they could not control the eruption of deadly epidemics and they could not safeguard the fecundity of the flocks. Gods gained importance because they offered solution to these problems. Fertility God, Rain God and the God of medicine took the center stage. The so called God’s main role was to mediate between the humans and the mute plants and animals.
The Scientific Revolution started in Europe around 500 years ago. The last 500 years have witnessed an unprecedented growth of human impact. One difference between religion and science is that science assumes humankind does not know the answers to many of life's biggest questions. Religion, however, assumes that the important stuff is already known. Science assumes human ignorance.

 Empires

Empires were the most common political system in the last 2,500 years. They also brought cultural convergence. After each conquest, locals were killed and oppressed. Over time, the survivors forget their origins and adopt common cultures that’re hybrids of their own and the ruling elites’. 

 The Scientific Revolution

Since the Cognitive Revolution, humans have sought to understand the universe. But humans started chasing science professionally just 500 years ago, around the year 1500. However, science brought a massive leap in progress because (a) it admits that any assumption can be proven wrong, and (b) it links observations and mathematical tools into comprehensive theories, which can then be tested and applied to new solutions.
Lightning was believed to be a sign of Gods’ wrath, until Benjamin Franklin disproved it with lightning rods. Malnutrition, disease and even death are now seen as problems to be solved by science rather than left to the will of God. However, science is still driven by economic, political, and religious agendas–the people/institutions who provide the funds decide where to focus scientific research and applications. Nevertheless the pace at which advancements are happening was beyond the imagination of our Chimpanzee cousins. The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic.

 Happiness:

There are various definitions of Happiness. Yuval Harari says that the feeling of Happiness is based on the expectations. He highlights the biological reason for happiness. He says that nobody is always made happy by winning the lottery, getting a promotion or even finding true love. People are made happy by only one thing, that is, pleasant sensations in their bodies. A person who just won the lottery or found the new love and jumps from joy is not really reacting to money or lover. That person is reacting to various hormones coursing through his bloodstream, and to the randomness of electric signals flashing between different parts of the brain.
The question is, ‘Can we control the sensations in our body? Human happiness conditioning systems differ from person to person. On a scale of one to ten, some people are born with cheerful biochemical system that allows their mood to swing from six to ten, stabilizing with time at eight. Such a person remains happy even if he loses all his money in stock exchange crash or lives in a big alienated city.
If we accept the biological approach to happiness, then history turns out to be of minor importance, since most historical events had no impact on our biochemistry. History can change the external stimuli that causes serotonin to be secreted, yet it does not change the resulting serotonin levels and hence it can’t make people happier.
There is only one historical development that has real significance. Now that we’ve realized the key to happiness in a way is biochemistry, we can stop wasting our time on politics, putsches and ideologies and focus instead on only things that can make us truly happy. Though modern world has found Prozac, a compound that raises the serotonin levels to lift people out of depression, nothing captures the biological argument better than the slogan, “Happiness begins within”. Money, Social Status, plastic surgery, Farm house, Powerful positions – none these will bring happiness to Humans for long time. Lasting happiness comes only from Serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.  

 The present: End of Homo sapiens.

The book began by presenting History as the next stage in continuum of physics to Chemistry to Biology. Sapiens are subjected to the same physical forces, chemical reactions and natural selection process that govern all the living beings. Natural selections may have provided sapiens with much larger playing fields than it has given to any other organism, but the field has still had its boundaries. The implications has been that, no matter what their achievements, sapiens are incapable of breaking free of their biological determined limits. But at the dawn of twenty first century this is no longer true; Homo sapiens is transcending those limits. It is now beginning to break the laws of natural selection, replacing them with the laws of intelligent design.
 Just imagine a character like Rip van Winkle fallen into slumber and woken up 500 years later in 2020 to hear the  ring tone of I-phone, he would have found himself in the world strange beyond comprehension. “Is this heaven? He might have well asked himself. ‘Or perhaps- Hell?
The last 500 years have witnessed immense growth in Human power. In the year 1500 there were about 500mn Homo sapiens and today the world has in excess of 7 bn. The total income of the world got increased from $250bn to $80trillion. The calorie consumption has gone up from 13 trillion calories of energy per day in 1500A.D. to 1500 trillion calories per day today.
Today humans have undertaken a Neanderthal genome project. Which is an effort of a group of scientists to sequence the Neantherthal genome, founded in July 2006. The researchers recovered ancient DNA of Neanderthals by extracting the DNA from the femur bones of three 38,000 year-old female Neanderthal specimens from Vindija cave, Croatia, and other bones found in Spain, Russia, and Germany.
But why to stop at Neanderthals? Why not go back to God’s drawing board and design better Sapiens? The abilities, needs and desires of Homo sapiens have a genetic Basis, and the sapiens genome is no more complex than that of Voles and mice. True, we still don’t have the acumen to achieve this, but this seems to be no insurmountable technical barrier preventing us from producing Super humans. And no matter how convincing the ethical arguments may be, it is hard to see how they can hold back the next step for long, especially if what is at stake is possibility of prolonging human life indefinitely, concurring incurable diseases and upgrading our cognitive and emotional abilities.
The challenges ahead are in the form of uncertainties that the Human brain is unable to forecast or be aware of. Economy in doldrums, Auto industry in terminal decline, US-China trade war a daily news, were some issues we humans were fighting with.  In Midst of all these challenges we got scared by an invisible threat.  Nobody thought of Corona virus pandemic that has created a threat over the survival of Humans. Then, as now, confidence in international cooperation and institutions plumbed new lows, can Human still prioritize the desire to become Super Human?



Disclaimer
The summary of this book is just an attempt to preserve the good points stated Yuval Harari. In an attempt to do this I have used my rational, experience, forecasts to reach a point.

Vinay Wagh
Bulls Eye, Nasik