Back to Blog
A brief history of humankind7/3/2023 ![]() ![]() The fact remains that the history of sapiens – Harari's name for us – is only a very small part of the history of humankind.Ĭan its full sweep be conveyed in one fell swoop – 400 pages? Not really it's easier to write a brief history of time – all 14bn years – and Harari also spends many pages on our present and possible future rather than our past. It's easy to see why Yuval Noah Harari devotes 95% of his book to us as a species: self-ignorant as we are, we still know far more about ourselves than about other species of human beings, including several that have become extinct since we first walked the Earth. ![]() So a book whose main title is Sapiens shouldn't be subtitled "A Brief History of Humankind". Homo sapiens, our own wildly egregious species of great apes, has only existed for 6% of that time – about 150,000 years. ![]() H uman beings (members of the genus Homo) have existed for about 2.4m years. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |