The key ideas

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari, 2011

How did a weak African ape, one that was afraid even of hyenas, become master of the entire planet? Yuval Noah Harari shows that it wasn’t strength or weapons. It was the ability to believe in shared fictions — money, laws, states — that let people unite by the millions. A big, honest story about the price we paid for our climb to the top.

Who it is for

Anyone who wants to understand how humans became the dominant species on the planet

What binds people together is not force or genes, but the stories they believe in together.

What the book is about

A hundred thousand years ago, several species of humans still roamed the Earth, and our ancestors were nothing special — an unremarkable animal somewhere in the middle of the food chain, more afraid of lions than lions were of them. Today, a single species, Homo sapiens, has reshaped the face of the planet, flown into space, and holds the fate of every other living thing in its hands. This book sets out to answer a simple, enormous question: how did that happen? What exactly let a weak, unarmed ape outrun everyone else and become master of the world?

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian who views humanity’s past from a great height, weaving biology, economics, and history into one coherent picture. His central answer is surprising: what made us powerful wasn’t strength or raw intelligence, but the ability to believe in things that don’t exist in nature — shared stories. It was around these stories that people learned to cooperate by the millions, and that is where everything else began.

Idea 1. We were an ordinary animal in the middle of the food chain

It’s comforting to think humans were always nature’s crowning achievement, but that isn’t true. For millions of years our ancestors were timid creatures — gathering berries, catching small prey, while bigger predators hunted them in turn. Even when early humans reached the carcass of a lion’s kill, they often arrived last, after the lions, hyenas, and jackals, and made do with the marrow in the cracked bones.

Why this matters: we climbed to the top of the food chain far too quickly, in a mere few thousand years, and nature never had time to adjust. Much of our trouble — anxiety, greed, cruelty — traces back to this: deep down, we’re still a jumpy ape that recently and suddenly came into enormous power. What to do: remember that our dominance is young and fragile, and treat it with caution rather than arrogance.

Picture an accountant who spent his whole career as a junior clerk, then, in the space of a week, unexpectedly became the director of a giant corporation. He still flinches at every call from upstairs, even though there’s no one upstairs anymore. That’s roughly how our species feels on nature’s throne.

Humanity is a newcomer to power, and we should tread more carefully than we tend to.

Read in Livria

About the author

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian and professor, known for his popular books on humanity’s past and future.

All books by this author: Yuval Noah Harari

Terms from the book

  • homo sapiens
  • cognitive revolution: a leap in thinking around 70,000 years ago, when humans learned to invent and tell complex stories
  • shared fiction: something that doesn’t exist in nature but that everyone has agreed to believe in: money, states, companies, laws
  • empire: a large state that unites many different peoples and lands under a single authority

All terms

Similar books