I’d been avoiding reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens for many years, ever since it appeared on the shelves of every bookstore. I’d read on the internet that it had an agenda, that it romanticized the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and was full of bad science and unsubstantiated claims. My friend started reading it a couple years ago and independently agreed with this assessment, abandoning it after a few chapters.
But more recently, it came up again in conversation, and I decided I should finally see for myself what it was like. Since my friend owned the book, I went and got it from her, so I didn’t have to monetarily support Harari. Since it was her copy, it was also full of angry post-its, which were fun to find in the course of reading.
Bottom line up front, what was the verdict? I think the world is on net better for this book existing. It definitely has some issues, overstating the effects of certain things and downplaying others to fit the author’s narrative, but it does a lot of things well and provokes readers to think about alien philosophies, which real people who were just as rational as modern people truly believed, in ways they wouldn’t normally. And this book enjoys a wide audience, bringing archaeology and philosophy and evolutionary psychology to the masses, which encourages people to find other sources and dig in deeper if it piqued their curiosity.
The main thing to know about this book is that it’s a long-form blog post, not popular science. There are some citations, but they’re fairly sparse, and the main points of the book are extrapolated from observations following a chain of verbal reasoning rather than robustly supported by evidence and statistics. That doesn’t make them necessarily wrong, and many of the conclusions he makes are interesting and persuasive, but I’m not sure if readers–including myself–are really capable of drawing this distinction long-term, when they recall topics discussed in the book. When you read something, it just goes on top of the big pile of stuff-you-know, and you don’t tend to store where you read that information and how trustworthy the source was. It’s very difficult to actually take things with a grain of salt–if you thought they were convincing at the time, they become beliefs, even if they really should only be held with like sixty percent confidence.
This is why I think the world is on net better for this book existing. There are definitely bad effects this book may cause, by presenting tenuous conclusions with high confidence. But I think the positives slightly outweigh the negatives in this case.
The takeaway
The book’s core abstract is basically, humans have been able to cooperate in large numbers and change the world because we’re capable of believing common myths. You can’t pack a thousand chimps into Trafalgar Square and expect them to behave with civility because there’s no social taboo or repercussions against flinging poo, running around, and screaming. Humans share beliefs on what is acceptable social behavior, such as wearing clothes, walking upright, not being too loud, and not making prolonged eye contact with strangers, and, more importantly, everyone else knows that everyone knows it. This common knowledge leads to the expectation that if one person violated these norms, he would be ostracized by all others, and therefore the common myth enforces specific, useful behaviors even when no one in Trafalgar Square personally knows each other. No other animals are able to do this, and therefore can only cooperate among individuals they know personally, limiting cooperation to a couple hundred individuals at most, or among individuals they are closely related to, as in a beehive, which limits optionality among individuals (you can’t decide to change careers and be a soldier if you’re a worker) and cooperation at a higher level, like between hives.
I think some people are confused or offended at Harari’s claiming stuff like “human rights” and “capitalism” are myths. But this is just disputing definitions. He defines “myth” not as something that’s inherently false, but as something that doesn’t have physical roots outside of human imagination. If humans collectively decided that humans don’t have rights, or that paper money was not legal tender, it would be so. I’ve read enough other books on evolutionary cognition to have the context to make that connection, but I could see how many readers would not. Harari does spend quite a bit of time explaining these definitions, though.
Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition. No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesise [or] women to run faster than the speed of light (147).
Culture is a myth, in that it doesn’t have any true basis in the laws of nature. But since cultures are always incentivized to claim that they’re immutable and inevitable, most readers will probably have internalized those claims to some degree.
Things it got wrong
This is what you’re here for, right? Let’s get right into it.
Romanticizing hunter-gatherers.
The main complaint that I’d heard and read before reading the actual book was that it presented the hunter-gatherer lifestyle as healthier than the modern lifestyle, and twisted evidence to show it. This was something it did do, but it only lasted for the first hundred pages or so, and then the book moved on. It wasn’t Harari’s main point, and indeed the end of the book takes on a rather trans-humanist bent. He was mainly stressing the fact that the agricultural revolution that took place between twelve and ten thousand years ago resulted in a short-term worsening of quality of life, yet for evolutionary and game-theoretic reasons, once one group started agriculture everyone else had to follow or else lose the arms race. However, he says this in very sensational language–“The Agricultural Revolution: History’s Biggest Scam!”–and does not clearly distinguish that later, higher-tech peoples eventually surpassed the forager quality of life bar.
I think the sensational language, which is employed throughout the book, is probably one of the reasons this book sold so well. I’m not sure what to think of that. On the one hand, a paleontology book selling well is probably good for paleontology and science communication generally. But if the clickbaity word choice muddles the message, is it worth it?
The “Tree of Knowledge” mutation.
This is kind of skimmed over, perhaps because Harari was aware it wasn’t a very strong argument. He states,
Although Sapiens had already populated East Africa 150,000 years ago, they began to overrun the rest of planet Earth and drive the other human species to extinction only about 70,000 years ago. In the intervening millennia, even though these archaic Sapiens looked just like us and their brains were as big as ours, they did not enjoy any marked advantage over other human species, did not produce particularly sophisticated tools, and did not accomplish any other special feats....Teaching such an ancient Sapiens English, persuading him the truth of Christian dogma, or getting him to understand the theory of evolution would probably have been hopeless undertakings....
The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We're not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language. We might call it the Tree of Knowledge mutation (21).
This is probably the worst section in the entire book. Let’s dissect it a bit at a time.
First, he states that there was no technological progress between 150,000 and 70,000 years ago. This is simply false. This time period roughly spans the Middle Paleolithic, during which both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were inventing different lithic cultures–that is, ways of working stones to make tools with sharp edges–that slowly progressed and evolved over that period [2]. The first burials that contain decorative or ritual grave goods such as seashells and particular animal bones are known from 130 kA and 100 kA, indicating a shift in how people viewed and treated their dead, implying some level of culture, communication, and potential spirituality. By 77-75 kA, Homo sapiens is known to have produced beaded bracelets, pigments, and carved statues [3].
Next, he claims that Middle Paleolithic Homo sapiens would not have been able to learn the way a modern human can. There is no evidence for this. While there are error bars on the emergence of anatomically modern humans, they definitely existed by 150 kA, and since they were by definition anatomically modern, that means we don’t believe there was some magical brain switch that hadn’t been flipped yet that would enable them to think the way we do. There were small further anatomical changes that came with the advent of agriculture between 12 and 10 kA, such as 3-4% smaller brains and smaller jaws more susceptible to impacted wisdom teeth, but that’s not what Harari is talking about here. He suggests that the “Tree of Knowledge mutation” occurred around 70 kA and revolutionized the way humanity operated. He also says that this is “the most commonly believed theory”, which is also totally off-base. I don’t know of any serious paleontologists who believe this. There are examples in the fossil record of rapid leaps forward, such as the emergence of neotenic chordates during the Cambrian explosion (larval sea squirts that refused to grow up, giving rise to the first fish), but the evidence simply doesn’t support the theory in this case.
The way humans are raised obviously plays a big part in what they are capable of later in life, so it’s likely you wouldn’t have been able to teach a caveman the theory of evolution because there are so many intermediate steps he would need to understand first. But if you took a Homo sapiens infant from 150,000 years ago and raised it in the modern world, it would almost certainly grow up indistinguishable from its peers. It might have a better chance of not having to have its wisdom teeth out, and it might be more vigilant and jumpy and less able to focus for long periods on delicate tasks or feel comfortable in crowds, but those differences would be minor compared to the things that it would have in common with everyone else.
He’s super down on Neanderthals.
Throughout the book, Harari makes claims that Neanderthals were incapable of certain complex behaviors, and that was what gave Homo sapiens an edge, leading to the former’s extinction. For example, he states,
Neanderthals usually hunted alone or in small groups. Sapiens, on the other hand, developed techniques that relied on cooperation between many dozens of individuals....One particularly effective method was to surround an entire herd of animals, such as wild horses, then chase them into a narrow gorge, where it was easy to slaughter them en masse....If violence broke out between the two species, Neanderthals were not much better off than wild horses. Fifty Neanderthals cooperating in traditional and static patterns were no match for 500 versatile and innovative Sapiens. And even if the Sapiens lost the first round, they could quickly invent new strategems that would enable them to win the next time (36).
This is again not true at all. Neanderthals are also known to have employed the tactic of driving herds into terrain where the hominids would have an advantage–and in fact, they routinely did this, while Homo sapiens more often simply out-marathoned their prey, chasing it until it could no longer move [4]. The claim that Neanderthals could only behave in “static patterns” is not based on anything; Neanderthals existed in Eurasia over a wide range of time and space, covering conditions from the tropical rainforests of Eemian Spain to the icy tundras of Ice Age Russia. Neanderthals who lived in different conditions had to be adaptable in order to persist there, and there’s ample evidence that groups in different places gathered different plants and hunted different prey, depending on what was available.
The more likely reasons that Homo sapiens ended up outcompeting the Neanderthals is not due to inherent superiority of one over the other, but rather due to the way their slight differences in biology influenced the way they lived. Neanderthals required many more calories to survive, potentially as many as 7000 per day for an adult male living in a cold climate [2]. This meant that they required a larger range to support a smaller number of individuals. Since individuals were more sparsely distributed, this limited their ability to trade, communicate, and cooperate between family groups, slowing technological progress. This progress was further hindered by the fact that Neanderthals didn’t benefit as much as Homo sapiens from projectile technology or things like needle and thread. Neanderthals delivered the killing blow to their prey by bracing a heavy spear against the ground and having other party members drive a large animal to impale itself on it. They were strong enough to take down mammoths and other giant animals in this way, while Homo sapiens would have been crushed if they’d tried the same. And since Neanderthals were larger and stockier, they ran hotter, and wouldn’t have needed clothing to fit as snugly or layer as easily as Homo sapiens. Since they didn’t need the tech, they didn’t develop it. But while projectiles were superfluous for hunting mammoths, they would have been perfect for Homo sapiens to repurpose for slaughtering Neanderthals.
In addition, due to Neanderthals’ higher caloric requirements, they were simply never as numerous as Homo sapiens. That meant that even if Homo sapiens never killed Neanderthals and only interbred with them, the resulting hybrid species would be expected to come out looking mostly like Homo sapiens. The reality is that we did both kill them and interbreed with them, and now most people are somewhere in the range of 1-5% Neanderthal. But that’s still a fairly large and detectable amount–you share only 3.1% of your genes with your great-great-great-grandparents–indicating that interbreeding was happening on the regular. If Neanderthals were considered human enough that first-generation hybrid children were allowed to go on and reproduce, they couldn’t have seemed that alien to our long-ago ancestors.
Neanderthals continue to crop up throughout the rest of the book, always used as an example of a brutish, stereotypical caveman. On the second-to-last page, when discussing potential transhuman creations, the author says, “We would have a hard time swallowing the fact that scientists could…create something truly superior to us, something that will look at us as condescendingly as we look at the Neanderthals (412).” I crossed out “we” and wrote “I, Yuval Harari”.
Claims that modern humans are no happier than the ancients.
In one of the last chapters of the book, Harari asks the question whether we can determine how happy people were in the past (do we even know the right questions to ask, given their expectations around what constitutes a good life would have been quite different?), and if we can, whether humans are happier now or back then. He argues,
Compare a medieval French peasant to a modern Parisian banker. The peasant lived in an unheated mud hut overlooking the local pigsty, while the banker goes home to a splendid penthouse with...a view to the Champs-Elysées....When the medieval peasant completed the construction of his mud hut, his brain neurons secreted serotonin, bringing it up to level X. When in 2014 the banker made the last payment on his wonderful penthouse, brain neurons secreted a similar amount of serotonin, bringing it up to a similar level X....Consequently the banker would not be one iota happier than his great-great-great-grandfather (389).
This is true–happiness levels are largely inborn and quite resilient to external conditions, recovering back to baseline even after winning the lottery or sustaining a life-changing disfigurement. However, it does not take into account the fact that the medieval peasant had much higher chances of something tragic happening to him: barbarians could burn down his village, rape his wife, and tie his intestines to a tree; he could easily contract cholera, smallpox, TB, plague, etc; he could scratch his arm on a berry bush and have the cut become infected, resulting in death; he could expect to lose fifty percent of his children before age fifteen, and his wife to childbirth at some point. All of those things have a measurable effect on happiness levels, and it’s absurd not to include these risk factors when determining if people in the past were happier.
Reducing things to dichotomies and being generally overconfident.
The book often reduces complex hypotheses to simple “some scientists believe extreme A, while others believe extreme B” dichotomies, as a sort of rhetorical method of introducing ideas. It then goes on to describe how reality is probably somewhere in the middle, which is true. One memorable example is regarding the above-discussed reason for Neanderthal extinction at the hands of Homo sapiens: Harari states that some believe Homo sapiens went on a genocidal rampage, while others believe we absorbed them through interbreeding. In reality, no one believes either extreme, so the framing of the explanation is misleading. Another example is on the topic of the family structure of ancient foragers. According to Harari, some believe that they lived in communes and had free sex with everyone, while others believe they were strict monogamists. In all likelihood, the full range of human behavior was represented at some particular time and place. No one really believes that ancient human social customs were uniform and rigid.
He also states things that are pet theories in tones that make it seem like they are fact. Many of Harari’s pet theories are pretty good, but they’re a long way from scientific consensus. For example, he says, in the chapter on capitalism,
The problem in previous eras was not that no one had the idea [of credit] or knew how to use it. It was that people seldom wanted to extend much credit because they didn't trust that the future would be better than the present. They generally believed that times past had been better than their own times and that the future would be worse, or at best much the same....As Jesus said, 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God'. If the pie is static, and I have a big part of it, then I must have taken somebody else's slice (308).
This is an interesting argument that probably has some basis in fact. Basic financial instruments like loans with interest have existed for nearly as long as coinage has existed, and certainly existed in Jesus’s day. But the machinery of capitalism didn’t really take off until the era of colonialism and exploration, in the 15th century. This worldview is one way to explain that gap. However, I think it’s unlikely that Jesus had that in mind when saying the line about the rich. It probably had more to do with the fact that rich people could easily become distracted by the accumulation of more wealth and the pleasures of living in luxury instead of spending time thinking about God and praying. If you have everything you need, what do you need to pray for? It’s a bit of a stretch to include this famous Bible verse as an argument in favor of this economic theory.
Things it got right
The two things that stand out to me that Harari does well are (1) favoring mechanistic explanations of phenomena–how a property of one strategy or belief results in it outcompeting others–and (2) assuming that ancient humans were rational, thinking beings like ourselves, and trying to get into their mindset to see how they could’ve believed crazy things like Zeus literally hurling thunderbolts. Both of these rhetorical strategies come through in his writing throughout the book, and I think they’re both pretty rare in other writing–Paul Graham comes to mind as another writer with this level of empathy and mechanistic understanding, but it’s definitely not the norm. This alone I think makes up for Sapiens’s shortcomings.
The gradual takeover of agriculture (and monotheism and imperialism)
If you believe Harari’s claim that agriculture was history’s biggest scam, why did we fall for it?
Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work--say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface--people thought, 'Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won't have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.'...But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children....If the adoption of ploughing increased a village's population from a hundred to 110, which ten people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the good old times? (87)
The key insight is that often, incentives result in outcomes nobody wants [5]. Since agriculture is more efficient, allowing the same land to feed more people, once you’ve made that transition you can’t go back to foraging, because there are too many people for that inefficient way of life to support.
Harari provides similarly mechanistic, gradual explanations of how monotheism became the dominant religious mode over polytheism, animism, and what he calls “dualism” (belief in a good and evil god, not to be confused with Cartesian dualism, which is the belief in separation of body and soul).
Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition (218).
In all worlds, you would therefore expect monotheism to outcompete all other faiths, due to the inherent incentives of monotheism.
Similarly, imperialism is by nature a dominant philosophy. Empires made all kinds of other excuses to themselves about why they were doing what they were doing, such as spreading the good word of Christ or democracy or technology to peoples who lacked it. But conquering and exploiting foreign lands was very profitable at the time (it’s no longer that profitable because the biggest wealth-generators are educated humans), and profit could be reinvested in more expeditions to make more profit. Regardless of the secondary reasons, it was a self-perpetuating system.
Explaining how smart people could believe unintuitive philosophies (and deconstructing familiar ones)
There’s a long chapter on religion, why and how different families of religion sprung up throughout history to suit the needs of that particular time and place. In particular, his descriptions of polytheism and of Nazism (which he calls a type of “evolutionary humanism”) are notable, since I’ve never really heard a compelling explanation of why those belief systems would have captured rational people before.
Polytheism does not necessarily dispute the existence of a single power or law governing the entire universe. In fact, most polytheist and even animist religions recognized such a supreme power that stands behind all the different gods....[but] the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans. It's pointless to ask this power for victory in war, for health or for rain, because from its all-encompassing vantage point, it makes no difference whether a particular kingdom wins or loses (214).
Furthermore, polytheism does a better job of explaining both the question “if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, why do bad things happen to good people?” and “if God and the Devil are fighting, what rules must they both obey, and who made those rules?” than monotheistic or dualistic religions. The gods are not all-powerful, and they’re often at odds with each other’s goals, but they’re all beholden to the impersonal power that’s above them all. As a sort of funny aside, Harari suggests a method for monotheism to explain the question of evil:
Monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe--and He's evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief (221).
After monotheism, Harari claims that what he terms “humanist” religions have dominated the last couple centuries. Among these are “liberal humanism” (belief in human rights), “socialist humanism” (Communism, the belief in the greater good), and “evolutionary humanism” (Nazism, the belief that humans might evolve into superhumans or devolve into subhumans, and believers must encourage the former and discourage the latter). Linking these three belief systems because they all worship humanity as the source of morality (and terming them “religions”) is an interesting strategy that I think a lot of readers would disagree with, at least at first. But I think the detailed explanation of how a reasonable person might believe these things is useful for understanding people who are often portrayed as historical villains.
“Evolutionary humanists” were right about the capacity of humans to evolve, and it makes sense that given that premise you would want to encourage “advanced” people to breed and “primitive” ones not to. They were wrong about most of the practicalities of distinguishing between groups of people, though, and in the brutal methods of enforcement. Harari notes that ironically, the Nazis’ extreme policies doomed more than just themselves, but racism as an acceptable philosophy across the world. Prior to World War 2, many respected scientists and politicians believed in evolutionary humanism to some degree. Afterward, no one would touch anything that sounded remotely similar to eugenics with a ten-foot pole.
Interesting conjectures
In addition to the confident-sounding explanations he gives for most historical happenings covered in the book, there are a few places where Harari makes conjectures with a little less force. These hypotheses are interesting, but either unsupported or too fresh to know the long-term outcome yet.
Decline of extended families and rise of the individual
A small section in the last few pages is dedicated to explaining how we got from medieval noble boys living together in a hall of the castle, their behavior on display at all times and the most important property of each boy being what the other boys thought of him, to children expecting to have individual bedrooms with closable doors that parents must knock on to ask permission to enter, and being told that they can do anything that they set their mind to, screw the haters. In other words, how the extended family and neighborhood community became much less important, and the sense of individualism much more important in the last century or so.
Even in large empires such as China or Rome, people in the past used to be organized into family-based community groups, who were responsible for working out all internal affairs among themselves and collecting their own taxes to then relay on to the kingdom. They provided their own education, healthcare, police, and legal services, and if they didn’t meet the kingdom’s standards, were punished collectively. This was for simple logistical reasons: the empire couldn’t feasibly go out to every peasant and understand his income and production well enough to collect appropriate taxes, and similarly couldn’t enforce consistent laws or educational standards across its entire domain. But as transportation and communication technology improved, it became possible for the government to have more insight into what individuals were up to. Now, if parents abused their children, the government could know and take the children away. If children weren’t being educated, the government provided schools. If people were dying of disease, the government built hospitals. And if you committed a crime, your cousin wouldn’t be punished for it alongside you. With the advent of lots of state-sponsored services, people were no longer dependent on the services their extended families once provided, and with the simultaneous consolidation of people into cities with corresponding job opportunities there, people started moving away from their hometowns at much higher rates than before.
All this makes sense, and the haphazard nature of the transition explains why we don’t really have good substitutes for the sense of community that the extended family used to provide. No one was consciously trying to create individuals and expiate the extended family; technology simply allowed people to drift away. However, Harari doesn’t put forth a theory to explain how the culture shifted so radically and so quickly, from your sense of self-worth coming from being respected by your peers to coming from your own individual accomplishments. The transition happened quite rapidly and mirrored the actual changing conditions, but it didn’t logically have to be that way. People could in theory still tell their children that the most important thing was to bring honor to the family, but we don’t.
The flip in consumerist messaging
Given capitalism is a very successful, self-perpetuating system, and it requires people to buy things to fuel continued economic growth, it makes sense that consumerism rose up alongside it. Capitalists are incentivized to try to incentivize consumption. But in the past, conspicuous consumption was seen as morally wrong, while today, basically any chocolate bar you pick up has the words “decadent” and “indulgent” printed on it. Snack foods claim “you deserve it”, spas tell you to “treat yourself”, and fancy cars advertise themselves as being the height of luxury.
Throughout history, people were likely to have been repelled rather than attracted by such a text. They would have branded it as selfish, decadent, and morally corrupt. Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology...to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression (348).
But he doesn’t explain how consumerism managed this remarkable reversal.
Against the plow hypothesis
Going back a ways, Harari asks the question why patriarchal societies are so much more common than matriarchal ones (though the latter does exist). I’ve written about this before, particularly the “plough hypothesis”, which finds a strong correlation between geographical areas where plowed cultivation was practiced and modern-day markers of misogyny. However, Harari isn’t a fan of this hypothesis, attempting to debunk it along with two other hypotheses to explain the prevalence of patriarchy.
First, regarding the plough hypothesis, he says, if strength is key to men’s dominance, why are the people in charge usually coalition-building strategists rather than strong individuals? Who your allies are is much more important in human, chimp, and bonobo society (chimps are patriarchal while bonobos are matriarchal) than your physical strength. There’s nothing he can think of stopping women from banding together to fragment and overpower men. This doesn’t address the actual numeric findings of the plough hypothesis, but asks it to hypothesize a mechanism for the correlation, because the obvious one doesn’t seem to fit.
Next, the aggression hypothesis: since men are more aggressive due to higher levels of testosterone, they’re more motivated to take risks and seek power. But while true that men make better foot soldiers (in an era of simply charging at the enemy and overwhelming through brute force), it doesn’t follow that generals should also be hyper-aggressive. To win wars, generals have to be more strategic than blindly rushing in, and per this hypothesis, women might make better generals.
Finally, there’s the demands of biology. Giving birth to and caring for children is very physically and calorically demanding, and women with support from others have much better outcomes than hermits. It indeed takes a village. But this doesn’t necesarily imply they need a man; why can’t they get help from other women–grandmas, sisters, adolescent babysitters, and the like?
After dismissing all these hypotheses, though, Harari doesn’t present an alternative.
Conclusion
There’s definitely a lot about this book that I’d consider problematic, in that either opinions are presented as fact or some conclusions are simply wrong. But the early history stuff is not a large part of the book, and even then, it’s still thought-provoking, and it’s rare that a paleontology book gets this wide of distribution. So if you think you’re capable of reading with a grain of salt (or at least, rereading this post afterward to remind yourself of what it got wrong), I do think reading this book will spark some interesting conversations, make you consider points of view you hadn’t before, and potentially lead you to look more into topics you didn’t know you were interested in.
References
[1] Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind: The multi-million copy bestseller. Random House.
[2] Sykes, R. W. (2020). Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. Bloomsbury Publishing.
[3] BBC NEWS / Science/Nature / Cave yields “earliest jewellery.” (15 April 2004). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3629559.stm
[4] White, M., Pettitt, P., & Schreve, D. (2016). Shoot first, ask questions later: Interpretative narratives of Neanderthal hunting. Quaternary Science Reviews, 140, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2016.03.004
[5] Alexander, S. (2023, November 19). Meditations on Moloch. Slate Star Codex. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/