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When the Agricultural Revolution happened 12,000 years ago, humans began gathering around areas where crops grew in the wild. They soon began planting more crops and forming more permanent settlements around them. Harari thinks life got really miserable for most human beings around this time—they had to spend many more hours doing hard labor to raise crops, they had to raise more children to help with farm labor, they lived in cramped quarters that spread disease, and they shifted from a nutritious diet of wild fruits and meats to limited diets of one grain, which made them malnourished. He also thinks people in farming societies suffered tremendous anxiety about their crops, and they were generally more miserable overall. Harari thinks that all this effort to make life easier—by shifting to farming—ended up making life harder for most of humanity.
History’s Biggest Fraud
History’s Biggest Fraud
About 10,000 years ago, Sapiens began manipulating their environments by sowing plant seeds and domesticating animals for labor or food Read more
Building Pyramids
Building Pyramids
A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon. Instead, he might have built for her the sumptuous tomb she had always wanted ! Read more
Memory Overload
Memory Overload
Harari thinks it’s easy to remember rules on a small scale, but in large societies, it’s much harder to know all the rules and make sure others are following them. Harari thinks the evolution of large societies demands a new skill that our brains aren’t hardwired for—retaining massive amounts of data Read more
There is No Justice in History
There is No Justice in History
Harari thinks it's important to remember “these hierarchies are all the product of human imagination.” No “known biological difference” exists between slaves and aristocracy, and there’s no biological evidence connecting race to intelligence or moral aptitude Read more
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