Table of Contents
Sapiens by Harari is an ambitious attempt to summarize the history of humankind, including our harsh beginnings when we competed with other human cousins for resources, our conquests, our innovations, our tragedies, and our greatest achievements.
This book will teach you about where you came from, and it will give you an idea of where you might be going.
Below is a summary of each chapter.
Chapter 1: An Animal of No Significance
The universe started approximately 13.5 billion years ago. Around 4 billion years ago, the earth formed, and around 200 thousand years ago, the first humans walked the earth.
Chapter 2: The Tree of Knowledge
Our ability to communicate effectively made us superior to other animals. All animals can communicate with each other, and in very sophisticated ways, but they cannot describe things in great detail, they cannot spread information about each other, and they cannot collectively believe in fictions.
Chapter 3: A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve
Ancient foragers had very different lives to us now. In some ways better, in other ways, worse.
Chapter 4: The Flood
There is a high chance that homo sapiens are responsible for the mass extinctions of various animal species that occurred in Australia, America, Africa, and other parts of the world.
Chapter 5: History’s Biggest Fraud
The agricultural revolution started around 10,000 years ago. Wheat was the first crop to be cultivated, and in the last 2000 years, no new additional crops have been added. We may have the minds of ancient foragers, but we have the cuisine of ancient farmers.
Chapter 6: Building Pyramids
Some argue that the agricultural revolution resulted in a period of great prosperity for human beings, a glorious turning point. Others say it was a curse.
Chapter 7: Memory Overload
Football is a sport that children seem to play quite easily, but there is no football gene that they inherited. They can only play because they learned the rules of the game and they live in a place where other children have also learned these rules.
Chapter 8: There is no Justice in History
History has not been fair. People who are disadvantaged economically will have children who are likely to be disadvantaged economically. The wealthy and the educated will have offspring who are likely to be wealthy and educated. People are not born with an equal chance in the world. But today things are much better.
Chapter 9: The Arrow of History
The novels by Charles Dickens teach us that the liberal regimes of 19thcentury Europe gave much importance to individual freedom, even if it meant throwing poor families in prison, and leaving orphans no choice but to join pickpocket schools. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s work shows us how Communism’s love for egalitarianism resulted in brutal tyrannies that sought to control every aspect of people’s daily life.
Chapter 10: The Scent of Money
Money is superior to bartering because when there are many strangers, the system doesn’t work. Only a small range of products can be exchanged through a barter system, but a complex economy of goods and services cannot.
Chapter 11: Imperial Visions
An empire is a political order. To qualify as an empire, you must rule over different peoples – each with their unique cultural identity and territory. The other requirement is to have flexible borders and an unlimited appetite. Modern day Britain has well-defined borders, but 100 years ago, anywhere in the world could have become a part of the British Empire.
Chapter 12: The Law of Religion
Polytheism is open-minded, it rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels.’ Even when polytheists conquered large empires, they did not try to convert anyone.
Chapter 13: The Secret of Success
Could history have been different or was it destined to be this way? Perhaps in some ways, a global society was inevitable, when seen from a bird’s eye view across thousands of years, but it is not clear that this global society was inevitable. That is, a world that consists of 2 billion Christians, 1.2 billion Muslims, and only 150,000 Zoroastrians. If we went back in time, and set the process going again, would the rise of monotheism at the expense of dualism be an inevitability?
Chapter 14: The Discovery of Ignorance
For most of history, we knew nothing about 99.99 percent of the organisms in the planet – namely, microorganisms. Not because they didn’t matter to us. We all carry billions of single-celled creatures within us. They are our best friends and deadliest enemies. Some digest food and clean our gut, others make us sick.
Chapter 15: The Marriage of Science and Empire
In the period between 1500 and 1850, the military-industrial-scientific complex blossomed in Europe, but why not in India? Why did countries like Britain, France, Germany, and the US leap forward, while China did not?
Chapter 16: The Capitalist Creed
Credit allowed people who did not have wealth, to make money. It is one of the greatest human inventions, but credit did not have such a glorious past. At one point, it was believed that the total amount of wealth was limited. When someone got richer, it meant that someone else got poorer. The pie could be cut in a million ways, but it could never get bigger.
Chapter 17: The Wheels of Industry
We used to rely on animals for energy. Muscle power was key to everything we did. Human muscles built carts and houses, ox muscles ploughed fields, while horse muscled moved things around. The energy that fueled this came from plants, and plants got their energy from the sun through photosynthesis.
Chapter 18: A Permanent Revolution
There are tens of thousands of wild animals, including giraffes and wolves, but there are hundreds of millions of domesticated animals, and billions of humans today. We have taken over the world.
Chapter 19: And They Lived Happily Every After
The last 500 years have seen breakthroughs in every area of human concern. We have become more scientifically competent, economically prosperous, peaceful, and secure, but are we happier?
Chapter 20: The End of Homo-sapiens
One of the lessons from the book so far is that humans have been unable to break free from their biological chains. No matter what lands they have conquered, and intellectual feats they have achieved, no man has been able to transcend their own biology – until now.
Read Sapiens
Other Harari Book Summaries:
If you are interested in reading books about unmasking human nature, consider reading The Dichotomy of the Self, a book that explores the great psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas of our time, and what they can reveal to us about the nature of the self.