Sapiens
We started as one of several human species on a minor continent. In 70,000 years we took everything.
The Story We Told Ourselves
Yuval Noah Harari's 2011 bestseller traces the full arc of Homo sapiens from the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago through the Agricultural Revolution, the rise of empires and money, the Scientific Revolution, and into the present. Harari's central argument is that what made humans dominant was not intelligence or tools but the unique ability to believe in shared fictions: money, nations, corporations, human rights. A book that reframes everything you thought you understood about civilisation.
Reading Sapiens
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"History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
"Yuval Noah Harari · Sapiens
Harari originally published Sapiens in Hebrew for an Israeli audience in 2011. An English translation was published in 2014 and word-of-mouth among Silicon Valley executives and world leaders accelerated its global spread dramatically.
The book has sold over 25 million copies in 65 languages and was recommended publicly by Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg. It made popular history publishing a category that literary agents had largely abandoned.
Seventy thousand years in one sitting
How an unremarkable ape ended up running the planet. Pick up Sapiens on Amazon.