Sapiens — P-1/Ch-1: An Animal of No Significance
So this is supposed to be a brief summary of the first chapter of Part one of the book Sapiens — A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
The author starts the chapter (and the book itself) by outlaying how the Universe came to be and laying out what Chemistry and Biology are, and how they both chronologically precede History as we know it. He then proceeds to divide History into broad revolutions:
i> Cognitive Revolution — 70k years ago
ii> Agricultural Revolution — 12k years ago
iii> Scientific Revolution — 500 years ago
He then proceeds to tell the story of the earliest humans, and how even they would be clueless that they would in the future, ‘take over’ the World. He emphasizes the insignificance of the Human species in its earliest form, and how we have evolved to be where we stand, whether it be the food chain or other aspects of existence.
This part also technically explains the words ‘species’ and ‘genus’, and lays out the definition of the term Homo Sapiens. TL:DR, organisms that can make fertile off-springs are categorized into one species, and species that evolved from a common ancestor are part of the same genus.
Next up, we go into species of the genus Homo other than Sapiens (us). The author explains how we have had other species, who were also from the genus Homo, walking side by side at the same time on this Earth. The three most important such species are:
i> Homo Rudolfensis — East Africa
ii> Homo Erectus — East Asia (us-west-1)
iii> Homo Neanderthalensis — (Europe and West Asia)
Humans (homos) evolved from a common ancestor Australopithecus, and then evolved into different species basis their new habitats and climates they’d have to survive. The author also mentions Homo Soloensis from the East Asian Solo Valley, who had to make do with less resources because of the rise in sea levels, due to which their height was a little over a meter, and they weighed somewhere around 25KGs only!
The author then goes on about how many such discovered ‘cousins’ must be waiting to be discovered beneath ice-sheets or in the insides of caves, and how we have really been no-so down-to-Earth in naming ourselves as Homo Sapiens, since Sapiens is Latin for ‘Wise’.
Next up we reach a point in the chapter where the author poses a good question. Why were we developing bigger brains, when it was physically more taxing to carry that kind of a brain and skull around n the wilderness? We were even using up a significant portion of our bodily energy in maintaining this infrastructure, and to be honest, it wasn’t as rewarding in the wild, where hunting and gathering needed muscle strength. He just writes, while answering this intriguing question, “Frankly, we don’t know”.
The most interesting thing in this chapter in my opinion, is how the author describes us standing upright, something that is just so normal for a reader of this book, but is peculiar to us in the entire Animal kingdom. It allows us to see farther away, scan more area for prey and predators, and enables us to use our hands for more intricate tasks, like making and using stone tools. It although, makes it difficult for us (women especially, since they’re ones giving birth to off-springs) to have a wider hip. A narrower hip would only allow a physically ‘smaller ’child to be born, which is why human babies are born prematurely than the other animal counterparts. A dog or cat baby would become more or less independent in just a few hours/days after birth, while a human baby would need years of nourishment. This would mean that we’d need more man-power to take care of a child, leading to us becoming more social than our animal mates. This is the reason why our children are more, as the author puts it correctly, ‘moldable’.
We can be taught things, our minds can be shaped in whatever way our surroundings are, just because we wanted to stand upright! I personally found this explanation of something so simple, so deep-rooted in History and Human Anatomy beautiful! These are the kind of things that make me want to read history more. But lets continue..
The author now emphasizes again, how insignificant in the food chain we’ve been, and how we as a specie have seen a sudden jump to the top, a reason he attributes to our war-like mentality.
We now come to the point in the chapter where we discover fire. It is fire that enabled us to scare the predators away, to clear huge amounts of land in minutes for agriculture, to grow food hence, and to cook. Cooking is seen here as a major shift for our guts, since we now spend a significantly less amount of time chewing and digesting food, and have more time in life in general, and gives us more energy to be spent in maintaining the brain rather our long intestines which have now shortened, hence enhancing the size and capabilities of our brain.
Next up, we see the the point in history where Homo Sapiens seem to ‘wipe out’ our distant cousins, the Neanderthals mainly.
He says that there are two theories as to why and how the other species got replaced by us:
i> The Interbreeding Theory: Here, we seem to have partially interbred with the Neanderthals and Erectus and everyone else. This would mean that the current Human from Europe is a bit more Neanderthal than an East Asian, who would in turn be a bit more Erectus, a startling result!
ii> The Replacement Theory: This theory states that since we were totally different species, attraction and ‘mingling’ wasn’t something that happened a lot, since fertile off-springs wouldn’t be born, which would make the modern humans genetically very similar, no matter where they live today.
Scientists have found the Replacement Theory to be more convincing, although they have found traces of Neanderthal DNA in ours, which is telling of the fact that the Interbreeding theory isn’t entirely wrong, and that the reality lies between the two theories, more toward the later one though.
Toward the end of the chapter, the author paints how would the Sapiens have erased the other species, and what would it be like if we hadn’t done so. What if we were still co-existing with the other species. All the categorizations of the modern world like religion, language, race would be re-drawn, and one of the most important such category would be species! It has been thousands of years since we’re the only ones here, and hence it is difficult for us to comprehend this reality.
