Summary: Sapiens: A brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Blurb

Harari attempts to capsulize humankind’s, and more specifically, Homo Sapiens’ existence over two million years of existence. He uses biology, anthropology, and sociology to link our ancestors from millennia past, and tells a gripping tale of how different species of humankind, at different times emerged, developed, and for some, died off and disappeared totally from the face of the earth. He explains how language, culture, and religion developed over hundreds of thousands of year even with the biological constants dictated by nature. He offers compelling arguments on what made humans superior to other animals, beyond just being able to walk upright, and deftly use opposable thumbs. Harari, in his sweeping tale of birth, survival, and death, categorically assumes the forces expounded in the evolutionary theories of Darwin, and puts question marks on those milestones of human development that evolution cannot explain. In a roughly, chronological order, he divides human progress into four distinct “phases”: Read more....