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Harari Sapiens

Sapiens

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Highlights

The fact is that a jumbo brain is a jumbo drain on the body. It’s not easy to carry around, especially when encased inside a massive skull. It’s even harder to fuel. In Homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2–3 per cent of total body weight, but it consumes 25 per cent of the body’s energy when the body is at rest. — location: 460 ^ref-3302

1–4 per cent of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA. — location: 570 ^ref-31646

Darwin indicated that Homo sapiens was just another kind of animal, people were outraged. Even today many refuse to believe it. Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart? Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate. — location: 609 ^ref-8869

legal myths. — location: 742 ^ref-15244

Why does he say legal myths in this case?

Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. — location: 744 ^ref-37863

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. — location: 800 ^ref-47516

The heated debates about Homo sapiens’ ‘natural way of life’ miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities. — location: 1021 ^ref-5702

The giant diprotodon, a two-and-a-half-ton wombat, roamed the forests. — location: 1318 ^ref-5741

This is probably incorrect as the Diprotodon was extinct way before 45,000 years since today.

14,000 BC. The first Americans arrived on foot, which they could do because, at the time, sea levels were low enough that a land bridge connected north-eastern Siberia with north-western Alaska. — location: 1385 ^ref-24975

Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. — location: 1516 ^ref-64263

Counterintuitive

This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution. — location: 1779 ^ref-43978

Is this a dig at Communism?

Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites – kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers – who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets. — location: 1845 ^ref-23817

Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity. — location: 1952 ^ref-31367

a. The imagined order is embedded in the material world. — location: 2035 ^ref-45345

b. The imagined order shapes our desires. — location: 2052 ^ref-41712

c. The imagined order is inter-subjective. — location: 2084 ^ref-38248

the art of reading quipus has been lost. — location: 2223 ^ref-17554

Why didn’t the Spanish write down the art of deciphering Quipus? ^ddb898

Even if somebody is born with a particular talent, that talent will usually remain latent if it is not fostered, honed and exercised. Not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities. Whether or not they have such an opportunity will usually depend on their place within their society’s imagined hierarchy. — location: 2376 ^ref-54939

If the peasant brother somehow developed exactly the same business acumen as his rich merchant twin, they still would not have had the same chance of becoming rich. The economic game was rigged by legal restrictions and unofficial glass ceilings. When the peasant brother made his way to the Beijing market, with his torn clothes, rough manners, and incomprehensible dialect, he would quickly have discovered that in the business world manners and connections often speak far louder than genes. — location: 2384 ^ref-51101

Last update : 25 mai 2024
Created : 21 septembre 2023