Sapiens: A brief history of Humankind, an opus by a renowned young Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari who is currently teaching at Department of History in the University of Hebrew, Jerusalem, narrates historically and philosophically that how we, Homo sapiens (the last specie of humans), have survived on this blue planet.

The writer has tried to connect our past advancements with our present happenings. His field of interest seems to be human history. He is the author of four other books including Homo Deus; A Brief History of Tomorrow and The Ultimate Experience; Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000.

The long history of human race has been explained in an interesting way yet authentically. The book is divided into four parts; Cognitive revolution, The Agricultural revolution, Unification of the humankind and The Scientific revolution.

The history starts with the evolution of the genus Homo nearly 2.5 million years ago from the genus of apes called Australopithecus, in Africa and how more than one species of homo were surviving on this planet but, now only sapiens, us, are left in this world. As every species on earth went through a slow process of evolution, so did the humans. The first major revolution in human history was cognitive revolution that took place nearly 70,000 years ago.

The cognitive revolution made humans to perceive things minutely and clear-headedly and enabled them to invent language. Invention of language was a major leap in the history of human evolution. With cognitive revolution our ancestors were set to create out multiple tools that could be used in hunting. This revolution caused humans to fabricate legends, myths, gods -- a kind of fiction (to talk about things that really don’t exist) in Harare’s words.

This fiction has played a vital role in making and sustaining largest human groups. The author is of the view that up to 150 humans can live together. This cognition gave another idea of imagined order, an order though not a real one, put a lot of impact in real life of humans binding millions of peoples together.

For instance, the money has been described as an imagined order which is just a piece of paper or metal whose value is prescribed imaginatively by human groups but is used in buying anything that is in real. The states, religions, money everything is embedded in this imagined order. As this revolution brought a multitude of positive changes in the lives of human, it also made them to kill other species for the sake of meat and other benefits and to assassinate members of its own species for dominance on the land.

Second major revolution is the agricultural revolution that is recorded around to be 12000 years ago. Plants and many wild animals were domesticated after this revolution. Earlier human used to live with nature mostly and was always in flux. He had no permanent settlements. But after the revolution in agriculture, human learned to grow plants like wheat by watering them and providing them essential nutrients for their growth which forced him to stay at that place for a long time. And, he began to draw boundaries for the first time which then drove humans to build homes.

As the author says, we didn’t domesticate the wheat but it ultimately domesticated us. Because before that humans were free to move. The domesticated animals were the major victim of the revolution that has been described great one. This domestication decreased the ages of the animals because we treated them like the machines for laying eggs, giving meat, milk and forced reproduction made them weaker before their mature age.

Agricultural revolution not just brought prosperity to the humankind it made him greedy too and led to alienation. And, further it led to wars on bigger scales.

Apart from revolutions, surfeit of other important changes are mentioned in the book. The author shows manifold forms of cruelty of the humans towards members of his own species. He includes racism, discrimination made on the basis of colour, religion and misogyny among most cruel things. Following agricultural and cognitive revolutions, the process of unification of humankind was on the way.

Religions comprised beliefs, codes and rules that unified people and gave them a particular identity. And, the most notable type of unification the humans acquired came in the wake of the expansion of states and trades across the globe.

The last part of the book focuses on the scientific revolution (nearly 500 years ago). It isn’t really the revolution of science, rather, in the words of Harare, it is the revolution of ignorance because humans have not succeeded in getting to the answers of most of the phenomena and things. Science has obviously provided humans knowledge to predict the changes in the physical world like death rates and the average production of food. With the advancements in sciences, the ideological changes like of capitalism and communism happened in the recent centuries.

Industrial evolution was referred to as the permanent revolution in the book. So, in the last 500 years, our human history has witnessed many revolutions that have brought up living standards of the humans by increasing their wealth and fulfilling their increasing needs. We can say that humans have gone through a lot of revolutionary changes that have made us what we are. But, these revolutions, summing up the author’s arguments, haven’t enhanced human intelligence.

We are in even 21^st century as intelligent as our forefathers have been throughout Millenia. The book also deals with some significant questions about human happiness. Are we really happy with, and in the wake of, all evolutionary and revolutionary changes that have taken place across the centuries? Have we really achieved real moral improvements?

The writer has tackled these questions philosophically and logically. He sums up the book declaring that in the wake of technological revolution humans have turned into gods but without godly wisdom.

 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Author: Yuval Noah Harari
Pages: 443
Price: £18.79