Sapiens - A Brief History of Humankind

“Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari is an audacious book. How else would you describe a book which in just around 500 pages crams in 2.5million years of history of human beings and yet snitches together a fascinating and extremely readable tale? 

The book had been smugly sitting on my list of must-read books for some years until recently when my book reading club - The Quill And Canvas Book Club in Gurugram  selected it for its monthly reading. Thanks to this push, I abandoned my lethargy and finally plunged in to it.

Sapiens is a story of the human race which evolved around 25Lacs years ago. While Harari is a historian, he makes a vast sweep and draws on biology, sociology, political science, economics in telling this tale.

The book is peppered with interesting nuggets of information and rides on lively, stimulating language to beautifully construct a virtual world of the yore for the reader. I found myself running alongside our ancestors while they stood up on two legs, hunted for mammoths, learnt new languages, conquered new lands, made new scientific discoveries – not what one would expect of a drab “history” book.

It talks of humans evolving through three phases, or revolutions as he terms them – Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific, which have slowly transformed us Sapiens from insignificant apes to “terror of the ecosystem” as we are today.

Cognitive Revolution occurred 70,000 years ago, when Sapiens developed a unique language with “ability to speak about fictions”. Gossiping, that is. It is with this feature that “Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless number of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.” Around 12,000 years ago came The Agricultural Revolution - “History’s biggest fraud”! Finally, in the last two centuries, The Scientific Revolution has brought us to a precipice of aleap in to an unknown and possibly unimaginable future where the real question facing us is “What do we want to want?”

I am tempted to quote whole phrases and sentences from the book here (and there are a lot of them floating around the internet too) but I would like you to first-hand relish the liveliness of language and intelligence of thought behind it.  

Admittedly, the book is not without its small issues. In the end when Harari is discussing modern age and future, he seems wandering off to an area more suited for spiritual gurus and the like – the question of what is happiness et al. Also, there have been some question from the critics about how Harari has over-generalised his theories.  

But let these minor foibles not spoil an otherwise magnificent read.  Sapiens has been translated from its original Hebrew language in to 45 languages . In 2019 now, it is five years since the first English edition was brought out and has consistently remained on bestseller charts. I can assure you that this adulation is totally justified. Go ahead and enjoy this story of all of us - Sapiens.