A Brief History of Humankind
In his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, scientist Yuval Noah Harari attempts a seemingly impossible task — packing the entirety of human history into 400 pages.
Harari, an Israeli historian, is interested in tackling big-picture questions and puncturing some of our dearly held beliefs about human progress.
"In some areas we've done amazingly well; in other areas we've done amazingly bad," he tells NPR's Arun Rath. "Humans are extremely good in acquiring new power, but they are not very good in translating this power into greater happiness, which is why we are far more powerful than ever before but we don't seem to be much happier."
The book charts humankind's journey from hunter-gatherer origins to a vision of the "superhumans" of the future.
Interview Highlights
On the various species of humanity
Until about 30,000 years ago there were at least five other species of humans on the planet. Homo Sapiens, our ancestors, lived mainly in East Africa, and you had the Neanderthal in Europe, Homo Erectus in part of Asia and so forth.
Just, I think, four or five years ago scientists completed the mapping of the Neanderthal genome and the most amazing discovery was that people of European origins today ... have up to 4 percent of their unique human genes from Neanderthal ancestors, which means there was some interbreeding. And this should make us realize that the gap between us and other animals is not as big as we tend to think.
Yuval Noah Harari teaches history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Ilya Malnikov/Courtesy of Harper
On the concepts that separate humanity from other species
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights. These are all things that do not exist objectively, but they exist only in the stories that we tell and that we spread around. This is something very unique to us, perhaps the most unique feature of our species.
