- Years Before the Present
- 13.5 billion
- Matter and energy appear. Beginning of physics. Atoms and molecules appear. Beginning of chemistry.
- 4.5 billion
- Formation of planet Earth.
- 3.8 billion
- Emergence of organisms. Beginning of biology.
- 6 million
- Last common grandmother of humans and chimpanzees.
- 2.5 million
- Evolution of the genus Homo in Africa. First stone tools.
- 2 million
- Humans spread from Africa to Eurasia. Evolution of different human species.
- 500,000
- Neanderthals evolve in Europe and the Middle East.
- 300,000
- Daily usage of fire.
- 200,000
- Homo sapiens evolves in East Africa.
- 70,000
- The Cognitive Revolution. Emergence of fictive language.
- Beginning of history. Sapiens spread out of Africa.
- 45,000
- Sapiens settle Australia. Extinction of Australian megafauna.
- 30,000
- Extinction of Neanderthals.
- 16,000
- Sapiens settle America. Extinction of American megafauna.
- 13,000
- Extinction of Homo floresiensis. Homo sapiens the only surviving human species.
- 12,000
- The Agricultural Revolution. Domestication of plants and animals. Permanent settlements.
- 5,000
- First kingdoms, script and money. Polytheistic religions.
- 4,250
- First empire – the Akkadian Empire of Sargon.
- 2,500
- Invention of coinage – a universal money.
- The Persian Empire – a universal political order ‘for the benefit of all humans’.
- Buddhism in India – a universal truth ‘to liberate all beings from suffering’.
- 2,000
- Han Empire in China. Roman Empire in the Mediterranean. Christianity.
- 1,400
- Islam.
- 500
- The Scientific Revolution. Humankind admits its ignorance and begins to acquire unprecedented power. Europeans begin to conquer America and the oceans. The entire planet becomes a single historical arena. The rise of capitalism.
- 200
- The Industrial Revolution. Family and community are replaced by state and market. Massive extinction of plants and animals.
- The Present
- Humans transcend the boundaries of planet Earth. Nuclear weapons threaten the survival of humankind. Organisms are increasingly shaped by intelligent design rather than natural selection.
- The Future
- Intelligent design becomes the basic principle of life? Homo sapiens is replaced by superhumans?
-
Whyvert: A few comments on Yuval Noah Harari’s bestseller "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" (2014). It is short, vigorous, and engaging.
- Its focus on Three Big Revolutions makes for a clear overview of history. Its a simplification, but that’s OK. https://t.co/R9thBiGSqp - Twitter thread by Whyvert, [link](https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1194837050702225408 )
-
But that Cognitive Revolution. Suddenly, 70,000 years ago, humans became “as intelligent, creative, and sensitive as we are”. Suddenly, people could have understood quantum physics. https://t.co/xitoUkqAlL
-
Not very likely. Many forager peoples have numbering systems consisting of "one, two, many". Paul Dirac is going to be able to lecture to them on quantum physics?
-
In any case, his 70,000 date is based on when he thinks modern humans began leaving Africa. There’s now evidence modern humans were in Asia long before that. Human cognitive evolution is a lot more complicated than one Revolution that suddenly turned everyone from dumb to smart.
-
Thanks to the big brain everyone suddenly acquired in the Cognitive Revolution, humankind escaped from the realm of biology into the realm of culture.
- Maybe it would be better to say that BOTH culture AND biology have been important, both before and after this event? https://t.co/1is6A5Q3EA
-
Harari’s understanding of culture is questionable. He thinks of it as fictions or myths (not eg as norms).
- Why do people cooperate? Harari thinks it is because of fictions/myths https://t.co/uivLf0opuE
-
According to Harari, fictions and myths are what allow humans to rule the earth.
- He seems to discount such parts of culture as knowledge or norms/rules/laws.
- Everything is fictional. https://t.co/1r133U9FVe
-
Next comes the Agricultural Revolution. Harari echoes Jared Diamond, who has called it mankind’s biggest mistake, by claiming it was history’s biggest fraud.
- (I will say he does not idealize hunter-gatherers.) https://t.co/6PXH6cYOYV
-
To say that "plants domesticated Homo sapiens" is a funny comment on how their genes have spread, but it is not an explanation of the origins of farming
-
Was agriculture such a big fraud or mistake?
- This thread has already gotten longer than I intended, so I will pause and return tomorrow.
-
The main gain from farming was permanent settlement (some lucky foragers along salmon rivers already had it). With settlement you can build a religious site, develop craft manufacturing, build a defensive palisade. So it is not all fraud or error.
-
Harari claims that scholars used to think of cultures as completely unchanging (strawman alert!). He asserts they are constantly in flux (is this a new orthodoxy?).
- Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to say that there is both continuity and change? https://t.co/Eart9QotZl
-
Harari has a lengthy section arguing that the trend of history is towards ever-greater unity, and he cites things like inter-connection, globalization, mixing of cuisines.
- Here again he is one-sided and exaggerated. There are also many kinds of division and disconnection. https://t.co/3k0YAd6pt3
-
In Sapiens, Harari does not give a role to geniuses or mega-agents, individuals who had a large impact on history.
- Constantine, without whom there would probably have been no spread of Christianity, is unmentioned. So is Ashoka, who ensured the spread of Buddhism.
-
Correction: Constantine is mentioned briefly. But the general importance of major agents is not at all a theme of the book.
-
Next: Harari’s third big leap, the Scientific Revolution.
- Apparently Europe is a mere peninsula of "Afro-Asia" (🙄 no, "Afro-Asia" is not a thing) and had "played no important role in history" (🙄 fashionable denigration of Europe) https://t.co/1ra7d1e4HT
-
"No important role" 🧐
- secular legal systems;
- exploring the world;
- massive printing/publishing; -
- individual rights, rule of law, and political representation;
- artistic experimentation; …
-
He may be right to regard the Scientific Revolution, not the Industrial Revolution, as the key event.
- David Wootton found a link from Denis Papin (scientist) to Thomas Newcomen (steam engine inventor), via Papin’s obscure book on pressure.
- Wootton: https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2019/11/10/steam-engine-time-4/ https://t.co/S7mV3UAzSq
-
The book is David Wootton, The Invention of Science.
- It has some good info, but I cannot recommend: it is very long (800 pages), repetitive, and digressive. Also, zero comparative content on why science arose in Europe as opposed to elsewhere.
-
In the book’s final sentences, Harari starts finger-wagging, chiding us for:
- -being discontented, irresponsible, and unsatisfied 😯;
- -not knowing our goals or direction or "what we want" (= "you ignorant people don’t want what you should want" 🥴) https://t.co/064gLukAMI
-
End of thread! If there’s a better short, popular guide to history, I’m not aware of it. Eventually I hope @razibkhan will write one 😄
-
Will Flyte: This is quite good:
- https://www.scribd.com/document/369491250/The-100-A-Ranking-of-the-Most-Michael-H-Hart-47005-pdf
-
Will Flyte: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History: https://t.co/I6Z9rxkkXT
-
We can quibble about who is on the list, but it is a reminder that major individuals (great men) have tended to be downplayed recently
-
Will Flyte: History is the story of
-
- evolution in different environments
-
- inventors (broadly defined…), and
-
- invaders
- and nothing else comes close.
-
-
Will Flyte: History is the story of
-
Siberian Fox: sorry, what do the colors mean?
- Bao Jiankang: occupation, scientist, religious figure, military leader…
- Siberian Fox: strange pizarro and cortes have their own color then
- Hypertorus: Mix between red and white, maybe? Explorers and conquerors?
- Siberian Fox: having downloaded it on libgen and read a bit, the innacuracies of questionable descriptions of characters I know well make go full gell-mann amnesia on the ones I didn’t, even if it has made me learn about a few non-western influencers.
- Siberian Fox: as long as it’s taken as amusement-educational I guess it’s ok, but it strikes me as making much less on an effort to be a serious ranking than even say, Murray’s Human Accomplishment
-
Will Flyte: It’s 3 pages per person on 100 people in radically different fields. Not exactly meant to be an authoritative biography.
- Any in particular you disagree with?
- Siberian Fox: Freud in particular is bad, both its position on the ranking and the entire entry inaccurate re: psychological science and in general I don’t see artists as being in the same level as conquerors or philosophers (reason Murray had separate list). Newton is right to be top 5,but…
- Siberian Fox: both Galileo and Copernicus so high seems excessive to me. Communist characters have innacuracies that you don’t even need to be anti-communist (100 million number particularly egregious),Mendel feels too high etc. Will have to keep reading how he justifies Isabella of Castille
-
Siberian Fox: Jefferson, Kennedy, Bolívar etc.
- One example where I worry is his take on Shakespeare. I could read it and see if the case for the alternate identity is persuasive, but given how far off he’s on Freud, it makes me cautious about having this book as single source
- Siberian Fox: (again I’m fine with it for entertainment-educational purposes, but a few seem out of place in top 100 and in general I feel it’s less serious than other attemps, if of course a massive amount of work)
- Siberian Fox: sorry not to mention: Moses is also egregious, and I think by 2000 biblical inaccuracy should be known
-
Will Flyte: This is also a winner for sheer information density:
- https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/lessons-of-history
- HT: @JamesClear
-
Will Flyte: "The first biological lesson of history is that life is competition.
- Cooperation is real…, but mostly because it is a form of competition.
- We cooperate within our group, family, community, and nation in order to make our group more powerful…
-
Will Flyte: "The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection.
- From nature’s standpoint, we are all born unfree and unequal."
-
Will Flyte: "Only the man below the average desires equality.
- Those who are conscious of being above average desire freedom. In the end, superior ability has its way…
-
Will Flyte: "History is the story of humankind in a struggle with other species and themselves for the limited resources and gifts of the environment.
- Competition is the basic law."
-
Will Flyte: "The basic reality is competition.
- If you are not competing in life, what would you develop? A certain degree of competition is necessary not only for progress, but also for survival."
-
Will Flyte: "Society is not founded on the ideals of humankind, but on the nature of humankind.
- We are a product of the forces and instincts that drive us.…
-
Will Flyte: "It is very dangerous for an individual to think that — even with 30 or 40 years of studying — he can judge and overcome the collective wisdom of the human race.
- Old ideas are very powerful.
- Will Flyte: "if religion is the shared belief that unifies a civilization and that belief system dies, then what will hold the civilization together?…"
-
Will Flyte: "The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character.
- The only real emancipation is individual.
- The only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints."
- Will Flyte: "No matter who is in power, the gains gradually accrue to the most clever and talented. Then, eventually, there is some fracturing of the order, a new minority rises to power, and the pattern repeats itself.…
- Will Flyte: "Persons under 30 should never trust the economic, political, and moral ideas of other persons under 30."
- Idiotsansavant: Interesting chart. I had to look up ts’ai lun.
- Leandro Cardoso: That would be my dream!
-
PSCV: Recommend this critical review of Harari by CR Hallpike https://www.newenglishreview.org/C_R_Hallpike/A_Response_to_Yuval_Harari’s_’Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind’/
-
yes, I agree with most of his criticisms, and I’ve added a few extra
-
PSCV: Also recommend Hallpike’s other writings as well including critiques of Chomsky and Rene Girard.
- https://www.amazon.com/Ship-Fools-Anthology-Nonsense-Primitive-ebook/dp/B07HX4188K
- Thanks for the rec. Reading it now.
- PSCV: Good thread.
-
PSCV: Also recommend Hallpike’s other writings as well including critiques of Chomsky and Rene Girard.
-
yes, I agree with most of his criticisms, and I’ve added a few extra
- 🌸🌸v🌸🌸: I genuinely think that Energy and Civilization is probably the great guide to history from recent books.
- Dominique Irigaray: Taking René Girard seriously as he deserves it: https://mimeticmargins.com/2019/11/05/the-point-yuval-harari-misses-of-myth-bringing-rene-girard-to-the-table/ by @BuysErik
- President-Elect Antipodean Reactionary: This book irritated the shit out of me. Mainly because due to its popularity, I had some expectations of it. "Everything is a fiction! Most of them are arbitrary, except these ones that we don’t like!". Finished with a transhumanist "I live from the neck up" prophecy. Junk
-
Will Flyte: This is quite good:
- Fadi Akil: Wow. That book is more ideological in its spirit than what I thought. Thanks for the review!
-
Seth Abrutyn: Gaukroger has a great book that is comparative. I have two other references that are slimmer volumes. Mostly focused on the Arab scientific revolution and why it stalled and how, through Iberia, fueled the European scientific rev
- Seth Abrutyn: Finally had a chance to look. Peter Dear (2001), david Lindberg (2007), and especially toby huff (2003)
- Yes Huff is good. It’s what I had in mind. I think I may have been too harsh in my remarks on Wootton. It has a lot of value.
-
halvorz ¯_(ツ)_/¯: man i need to finish that damn book
- It is too long, too disorganized IMO
-
halvorz ¯_(ツ)_/¯: ooh yes I like that excuse
- but the half I read was so freakin interesting
- yeah, that’s the problem
- 17thCenturyShytePost: Neal Stephenson vindicated once again
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Lucre Snooker: Afro-Asia when the Western Europeans conquered the holy land for a while and also retook Iberia be like https://t.co/oBNraky6EG
- Yohanan Domnius: Hm, I vaguely remember something about some, how were they called, ah yes Romans. And there were those Gr, Gr, ah yes Greeks. And an empire or two, or a few more. And there was something about lingua franca or two, for long parts of history… And that’s just for start.
- A Dangerous Chinese Bat 🌐: Up until 1500 he said.
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Steve Sailer: Presumably Harari is defining Greece and Rome out of western Europe, but I can recall this important role played by Western Europeans before 1500 AD: the Fall of the Roman Empire.
- There’s even a book about it!
- jimmyla: When he says that Europe played no important role in history till 1500’s, you realize he’s completely ignorant of History and Civilization development.
-
Next: Harari’s third big leap, the Scientific Revolution.
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Lazy Glossophiliac: The triumph of monotheism was inevitable. Would have happened without Constantine. It might have happened through Christianity or something else. There was a boom of eastern religions and a decline of Greco-Roman cults.
- Lazy Glossophiliac: Monotheism won because it was intolerant. Some forms still are. If you believe there’s only one God in the Universe, you have to conclude that everyone who promotes other Gods is a liar.
- Lazy Glossophiliac: There were no religious wars before monotheism. Lots after. It was like aggressive, Africanized bees conquering territory from normal, domesticated ones.
- Lazy Glossophiliac: From these quotes, my impression of this book is negative.
- I’m mainly focusing on the doubtful parts, there’s more to the book than fits in a few tweets
- jimmyla: the wannabe psychohistorians have trouble dealing with a Mule-like figure.
- Mats Vinnaren: By the same token, he is absolutely incorrect. Reality is opposite to his verdict.
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𝓒𝓱𝓻𝓲𝓼𝓽𝓲𝓪𝓷 𝓖: He’s from Israel. The usual spin.
- I find Israelis refreshingly blunt and no-nonsense usually
- Tony Morley II: Caloric surplus is the prerequisite of settlement - without a surplus of foodstuffs, specialisation is precluded. Without specialisation, advanced trade, technology and craft manufacturing is precluded. Primitive #agriculture kicked off civilization. 🌾🍞🐐🥛🐂🥩 #HumanProgress
- Sage Gibbons: Nodding my head with all of this but must note how much this tweet sounds like an RPG skill tree progression
-
Harari claims that scholars used to think of cultures as completely unchanging (strawman alert!). He asserts they are constantly in flux (is this a new orthodoxy?).
- ice9: Doubtful. If only because the resulting population explosions eventually, after many years, led to improvements in technologies used for the benefit of said populations at large.
- Shift Lant: Wouldn’t it also imply a genetic change?
- Reid Albecker: "Plants domesticated Homo sapiens" is a comment meaning agriculture changed the cultures of of the people who adopted it.
-
Was agriculture such a big fraud or mistake?
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Lazy Glossophiliac: This seems like a terrible book. The agicultural revolution made civilization possible.
- Jan Minar ❤️: Civilization is like Democracy — we all know it’s a really good thing, because it pays for its own PR.
-
Jan Minar ❤️: Settled agriculture allowed the hunter-gatherer elite to farm their less genetically endowed relatives like cattle (along with animal cattle & plants). The elite always had existed — those who survived the astronomical death rates of the hunter-gatherer society.
- Jan Minar ❤️: To make the argument that humankind suffered by the ag revolution, you would have to show that the number of people who are free and elite and what have you was decreased by it. Which is obviously not so.
- Mats Vinnaren: Neither of these dudes are rigid scientific intellectuals. As wonderfully written & pieced together their hyped magnum opuses are, they are too inaccurate, incorrect, & deficient descriptions of reality; of historical & societal phenomena w/ strong biological causes.
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Cameron Harwick 🏛: This was actually the reason I liked the book so much more than everyone else seems to. Myth and norms aren’t separate explanations; in fact I’d say myth is an essential component of most norms. I thought Harari’s discussion of this point was excellent for a pop sci book.
- He uses the example of Peugeot and its lion symbol as a fiction. But how is that organization based on a myth?
-
Cameron Harwick 🏛: Miller (1992) models "company culture" as a myth-like sort of thing that overcomes shirking problems within firms. Anthropologically, it’s not insignificant that meaning-laden symbols (like the Peugeot lion) coordinate altruistic behavior in humans. https://t.co/yIcW8TudvL
- Cameron Harwick 🏛: Reading back over that section in Harari, I’ll grant the connection is sketchy there. The legal fiction point seems like an overly specific instance of how humans use symbols to elicit buy-in against what would otherwise be our individual best interests.
- Reid Albecker: Not a departure from the gist of the "social imaginary" construct, which is consistent with Harari’s writing and does not discount norms/rules/laws. Increases in a culture’s knowledge can be facilitated as a result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(sociology);
-
🌸🌸v🌸🌸: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_anthropology
- It’s like generative anthropology, but for simple people.
-
🌸🌸v🌸🌸: ie more concrete:
- There was the Original Event that created modern language (hence fiction).
-
SHUTUP!: What about spoken language? Is that not the strongest social glue of them all? NEXT‼️
- Yes it is. But everyone has speech, whereas cooperativeness varies among individuals and groups
- SHUTUP!: I’m not sure what you’re saying. But I’m saying speech was the primary social behavior that allowed humans to cooperate and ultimately dominate earth. Not mythology, fiction, or even knowledge. Those are all secondary. Idk why the author focuses on myth
- Soulsweller: No, he is pretty spot on about this. You’re interpreting him too literally: he uses fiction as a synonim for what has traditionally been referred to as symbolic thought.
- Seth Abrutyn: Nonsense.
-
Jan Minar ❤️: Shared mythology allows people to synchronize their norms, without litigating what those norms ought to be every time something needs to be done.
- No other social technology can do this, so our ability to have myths must have been the start of history as we know it, QED.
-
Jan Minar ❤️: Myths not in the sense of entertainment-level narratives, but in the sense of narratives people believe so deeply they are not even necessarily consciously aware of it.
-
How do we know they exist then?
-
I don’t deny that myths exist and that they can prompt people to act together; what I do deny is that they always do so and are the basis of all collaboration
-
Jan Minar ❤️: What other social tech can supplant them?
- You have these massive nations several orders of magnitude above the Dunbar number, that instantly can co-operate across time and space.
-
I think variation in innate cooperativeness is more important than "social tech"
- Japanese are more cooperative than Somalis, but not because they have myths.
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Jan Minar ❤️: What other social tech can supplant them?
- Jan Minar ❤️: They are brought to stark relief whenever we live alongside people of a different mythology for a while, and reflect upon it. That’s why people in their 20s should travel.
-
I don’t deny that myths exist and that they can prompt people to act together; what I do deny is that they always do so and are the basis of all collaboration
-
How do we know they exist then?
-
Maybe norms synchronize for a simpler reason: people tend to copy each other?
- Jan Minar ❤️: For that you need empathy, i.e. theory of personality, i.e. you need to understand what the other person deeply believes. Shared meaningful experiences (the other part of religion: rituals) help syncing this, but myth is crucial in syncing the interpretation as well.
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Jan Minar ❤️: As a counter-point, go pick someone you know who has converted to a new religion — you won’t be able to understand anything about his new interpretation of the world at all.
- Myth is that technology via which we copy the norms.
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Seth Abrutyn: Agreed on that last point. I remain skeptical of the agricultural revolution being 12000 years ago, when the plow hadn’t been invented yet and really it was the end of the ice age and the slow onset of sedentary life. I would also argue the plow+writing (c. 5000 BP)…
- Seth Abrutyn: were far more important than whatever he thinks happened 12000 yrs ago.
- I’d like to see you expand on that idea sometime
- Seth Abrutyn: I will take you up on that. Maybe I’ll write a quick blog post about it later this week or early next.
- Lazy Glossophiliac: I think the earliest surviving statues and figures are from about 45k years ago. That seems like a more important point than 70k years ago.
-
Atlanto Celtica: Just because there were modern humans living in Asia over 70kya doesn’t mean they have any descendants living today.
- I hope find out soon. The way it goes is that they probably passed on some ancestry
-
Thanks to the big brain everyone suddenly acquired in the Cognitive Revolution, humankind escaped from the realm of biology into the realm of culture.
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Leandro Cardoso: We are quite dumber as we usually think we are. We have culture and inter-generations passed info, but we alone, individually, are not able to solve simple problems like "reinvent" Euclidean Geometry if one is born wild in the jungle.
- Leandro Cardoso: I can handle some math tools like ODEs and some algebra, but I am quite sure I can not figure out alone how to catch a hare and make it a meal. If my "tribe" had teached me how to survive in the jungle, probably I would be unable to handle simple polynomial derivatives by myself
-
Tim Rooney: Potential reframe- brains were developed enough so you could take an infant and successfully raise it in our society
- Not that you could walk up to someone and teach them quantum physics
- Which you can’t really do, even today
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luke.richert: Isn’t that just an incidental result of culture, location and necessity though? In the abstract all anatomically modern humans have an equal shot at getting Dirac (even if the capability didn’t arrive in a magic burst 70 ka)
- I disagree. Distribution of genius is not at all equal among populations
-
In any case, his 70,000 date is based on when he thinks modern humans began leaving Africa. There’s now evidence modern humans were in Asia long before that. Human cognitive evolution is a lot more complicated than one Revolution that suddenly turned everyone from dumb to smart.
- Siberian Fox: some of the points you mention are mentioned here, which is pretty good except for an absolutely retarded point about darwinism toward the end https://www.newenglishreview.org/C_R_Hallpike/A_Response_to_Yuval_Harari%27s_%27Sapiens%3A_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind%27/
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Pumpkin Person: does he think any of these revolutions were caused by genetic changes?
- The first one presumably
- fall duder: the book that earned harari a ferrari
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TakingHayekSeriously🧨: The book was so elementary — when not stupid — I had to put it down. For those who don’t know much, only.
- It s useful to look at because it encapsulates much conventional wisdom
- TakingHayekSeriously🧨: I’ll give it another try …
- Haha, I don’t want you to suffer needlessly!
- Mats Vinnaren: I haven’t read it yet but unfortunately it seems it’s like Guns, Germs, & Steel in how it’s well written, captivating journey but leaves out all the most valid, powerful explanations for outcomes, forwarding a hypothesis not holding up under rigid scrutiny.
- 𝗦𝗜𝗠O𝗡 O’𝗥𝗘𝗚𝗔𝗡 🦊: save thread
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the L 💀🔗✒: guess what https://t.co/klBzr8PWva
- wow! a graphic version
- the L 💀🔗✒: he’s even the readers’ personal guide/narrator throughout the whole thing
-
@harari_yuval should read the following papers:
-
https://sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/how-early-christian-church-gave-birth-today-s-weird-europeans… (Catholic church banning cousin marriages -> unique success of NW Europe)
https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf… (Ashkenazi Jewish IQ & genetic origins -> extraordinary success in intellectual domains especially at top)
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- https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/an-historians-evolving-vision-of-mankind/
- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/sapiens-brief-history-humankind-yuval-noah-harari-review
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-by-yuval-noah-harari-1423261230
- https://www.newenglishreview.org/C_R_Hallpike/A_Response_to_Yuval_Harari’s_’Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind’/
- https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2019/02/21/an-open-letter-to-an-author/
- https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/a-reductionist-history-of-humankind
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIp09Vwja6c&feature=youtu.be&t=1055
- https://mimeticmargins.com/2019/11/05/the-point-yuval-harari-misses-of-myth-bringing-rene-girard-to-the-table/
- https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/unacknowledged-fictions-of-yuval-harari/
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Others to read:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Rutherford
- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Transcendence-Humans-Evolved-through-Language/dp/0241281113
- For people who want a concise (and original) statement of the "agriculture was bad" theory read Jared Diamond’s short essay "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”. (And if you are aware of the degree to which current scholarship supports/refutes please let me know!)
- {{query: {and: q Sapiens📒}}}
- {{query: {and: Claim Sapiens📒}}}
-
pre-reading
- the two other things I’ve read about this is John Vervaeke about the Upper Paleolithic transition, and [[The Elephant in the Brain📒]]. First talks about a big change brought on by a more complex world, about shamans, and then a lot about psycho-technology. The second about how we evolved in social groupings to lie and manipulate. #m
-
Questions: #q
- What are his main points?
- Is it mostly a historical summary of how we developed, or is he making some bold claims?
- Do his insights come mostly in the form of neurobiology, evolutionary biology, social psychology, etc?
- To what extent does what he says give us new insights about how we are today and where we’re going?
-
What did we not know 50-100 years ago? What are the big unknowns that might change this story in another 50 years? How does the way it was written reflect the current ‘Zeitgeist’.
- internalized Darwinism, post-modernism (? Kristin says: the way he presents religion, human construction)
- Timeline of human pre-history Wikipedia
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1: An animal of no significance
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revolutions
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70,000 cognitive revolution
- Toba catastrophe
- 12,000 agricultural revolution
- 500 scientific revolution
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70,000 cognitive revolution
- Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One become the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother. (l 120) #Claim
- From 2 million BC to 10,000 BC, the world was home to multiple human species - it was not a linear model of evolution. 100,000 years ago, there were at least six species of humans alive.
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Physical evolution
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large brains (why did evolution favour this over 2 million years, given the cost)
- needs a lot of energy, resulting in less muscles/speed
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walking upright - seeing farther, freeing hands for other things
- nerves and muscles making hands very flexible/intricate
- skeletal pains
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narrow birth canal, many women dead in childbirth
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giving birth earlier is advantageous, humans born prematurely
- needs a society to support, but also enables more socialization and education
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giving birth earlier is advantageous, humans born prematurely
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large brains (why did evolution favour this over 2 million years, given the cost)
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We were until recently middle of the food chain - using tools to extract bone marrow after all the other animals were done. Our jump to the top of the food chain happened suddenly (last 100,000 years)
- other animals on the top of the pyramid, slowly, ecosystem had time to adapt (checks and balances)
- humans themselves failed to adjust - other top predators are "majestic creatures" we are "banana republic dictators"
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Fire
- started 800,000 years ago, 300,000 using daily
- dependable source of light and warmth
- deadly weapon
- torching neighbourhoods -> grasslands that are easier to hunt
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enable us to eat things we could not digest otherwise
- also kills germs/disinfects food
- speeds up eating - don’t need to chew for five hours
- shortening intestine tract - more energy for large brain?
- 150,000 ago sapiens looking physiologically identical to us
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75,000 ago spread to Arabia
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interbreeding theory
- thus different "races" would be the result of homo sapiens interbreeding with different other human species in different geographic regions?
- study in 2010, 1-4% of unique human DNA is Neanderthal
- 6% of unique human DNA of modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan
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replacement theory
- out-hunting/gathering
- violence and genocide
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interbreeding theory
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last remains
- homo soloensis 50,000
- homo denisova same
- neanderthals 30,000
- flores 12,000
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revolutions
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2: The three of knowledge
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100,000 years ago, sapiens went to Levant, but failed and retreated.
- Less smart than current humans, internal wiring?
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70,000 years ago, Upper Paleolithic transition - he calls it cognitive revolution
- left Africa for the second time
- quickly reached Europe and East Asia
- 45,000 years ago - Australia over the open sea (first humans)
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inventions
- boats
- oil lamps
- bows
- arrows
- needles
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social
- art
- religion
- commerce
- social stratification
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why?
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accidental genetic mutations changing inner wiring of brains of Sapiens? (most commonly believed)
- "Three of Knowledge mutation"
- John Vervaeke seems to argue that it’s rather the development of psycho-technology, rather than a biological development #m
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enabled flexible language - information sharing, gossiping, primarily a social animal
- re [[The Elephant in the Brain📒]]
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enabled cooperation in larger groups, tigher and more sophisticated types of cooperation
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[[Awakening From the Meaning Crisis]] does talk about more complex forms of interaction, but its unclear what is cause and what is effect
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- Upper Paleolithic transition
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[[Awakening From the Meaning Crisis]] does talk about more complex forms of interaction, but its unclear what is cause and what is effect
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accidental genetic mutations changing inner wiring of brains of Sapiens? (most commonly believed)
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Our species go back about 200,000 years. But there’s a continuum because about 40,000 years ago, we see new things.
- art
- music
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symbolic calendars
- keeping track of the moon (easier to hunt)
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projectile weapons (throwing spears and slings)
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throwing is reflected in a lot of the words that we use
- subject
- object
- project.
- very complex activity, which you can see from trying to teach artificial intelligence to throw
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throwing is reflected in a lot of the words that we use
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humanity developed because of threat/pressure
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Around {70,000} years ago, humanity was threatened by extinction, only about 10,000 left
- last Ice Age
- supervolcano
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Around {70,000} years ago, humanity was threatened by extinction, only about 10,000 left
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survived because of socio-cultural and socio-cognitive development (link to Shamans?)
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they developed larger trading networks
- allowed them to be more resilient to the different climate.
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distributed cognition
- networking brains together to solve hard problems.
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they developed a set of rituals that allowed them to deal with these broader social networks.
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Interacting with strangers
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New situation
- Currently we live in cities, constantly interact with strangers
- But very strange to be around strangers that are not part of your kinship group, that you didn’t know.
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We had to develop rituals
- to be able to trust each other
- to be able to understand each other
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like **handshaking **
- to take someone’s hand,
- you see that they have no weapons,
- you get some feeling, whether they’re sick, whether they’re stressed,
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Understand others
- you need to be able to put yourself in their position,
- need to be able to imagine what they’re thinking
- mindsight pick up on their emotions.
- And as we do that, we gain a better ability to get insight into our own thinking and mental processes and this is the beginning of mindfulness.
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New situation
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Maintaining our own group affiliation
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As we develop rituals to be better able to deal with strangers, we have another problem, the trust from our own group
- before that wasn’t much in doubt, because you were always with them.
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But now, there is temptation.
- A pervasive theme of myth: being lured away by the stranger.
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We develop rituals to prove our loyalty, initiation rituals that involve pain or danger.
- Requires a decentering because we are not in the center, but our group is
- Also requires much stronger control of our emotions, and how we express them
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As we develop rituals to be better able to deal with strangers, we have another problem, the trust from our own group
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Interacting with strangers
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they developed larger trading networks
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only humans can chat about things that do not exist (because of enabled flexible language - information sharing, gossiping, primarily a social animal)
- legends, myths, gods, religions
- "Fiction has enables us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively" (l. 415)
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Sociological research has shown that the maximum "natural" size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Dunbar’s number #Claim
- very rarely have sociologists observed groups larger than a hundred (chimpanzees), usually 20-50
- "even if a fertile valley could feed 500 archaic Sapiens, there was no way so many strangers could live together"
- what is "natural" size?
- what does "bonded by gossip"? What are other ways of bonding?
- What empirical evidence? Counter-evidence?
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Wikipedia:
- This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size.[3] By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.
- Primatologists have noted that, due to their highly social nature, primates must maintain personal contact with the other members of their social group, usually through social grooming. Such social groups function as protective cliques within the physical groups in which the primates live. The number of social group members a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex. This suggests that there is a species-specific index of the social group size, computable from the species’ mean neocortical volume.[citation needed]
- In 1992,[1] Dunbar used the correlation observed for non-human primates to predict a social group size for humans. Using a regression equation on data for 38 primate genera, Dunbar predicted a human "mean group size" of 148 (casually rounded to 150), a result he considered exploratory due to the large error measure (a 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230).[1]
- Dunbar then compared this prediction with observable group sizes for humans. Beginning with the assumption that the current mean size of the human neocortex had developed about 250,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene, Dunbar searched the anthropological and ethnographical literature for census-like group size information for various hunter–gatherer societies, the closest existing approximations to how anthropology reconstructs the Pleistocene societies. Dunbar noted that the groups fell into three categories—small, medium and large, equivalent to bands, cultural lineage groups and tribes—with respective size ranges of 30–50, 100–200 and 500–2500 members each.[citation needed]
- Dunbar’s surveys of village and tribe sizes also appeared to approximate this predicted value, including 150 as the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village; 150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline’s sub-specialisation; 150 as the basic unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity and in modern times since the 16th century; and notions of appropriate company size.[citation needed]
- Dunbar has argued that 150 would be the mean group size only for communities with a very high incentive to remain together. For a group of this size to remain cohesive, Dunbar speculated that as much as 42% of the group’s time would have to be devoted to social grooming. Correspondingly, only groups under intense survival pressure,[citation needed] such as subsistence villages, nomadic tribes, and historical military groupings, have, on average, achieved the 150-member mark. Moreover, Dunbar noted that such groups are almost always physically close: "[…] we might expect the upper limit on group size to depend on the degree of social dispersal. In dispersed societies, individuals will meet less often and will thus be less familiar with each other, so group sizes should be smaller in consequence." Thus, the 150-member group would occur only because of absolute necessity—due to intense environmental and economic pressures.
- Dunbar, in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, proposes furthermore that language may have arisen as a "cheap" means of social grooming, allowing early humans to maintain social cohesion efficiently. Without language, Dunbar speculates, humans would have to expend nearly half their time on social grooming, which would have made productive, cooperative effort nearly impossible. Language may have allowed societies to remain cohesive, while reducing the need for physical and social intimacy.[9][10] This result is confirmed by the mathematical formulation of the social brain hypothesis, that showed that it is unlikely that increased brain size would have led to large groups without the kind of complex communication that only language allows.[11]
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** Fiction as the way to overcome the Dunbar’s number - Any large-scale human cooperation is rooted in common myths that exist only in peoples collective imagination.** (l. 459)
- #q is this related to social constructivism "everything is constructed"?
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Legend of Peugeot #**theory of the firm**
- Does the company exist? It’s a "legal fiction".
- comparing it to sorcery, myths etc
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we can rapidly change the ways in which we collaborate through changing the myths - French revolution
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basically letting us "evolve" much faster than genetic evolution
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#m
- psycho-technology?
- Marxist dialectics, superstructure and material conditions?
- nature/nurture? but to what extent does this apply to all individuals in a certain civilization, or to a smaller collective (nation state?), or even to classes within that nation state (I grew up in a White middle-class area with hippie parents etc…)?
- he is making an argument about learning - through language and written text, however he is framing it as "shared myths"… is this the same or different? yes everything (including language, letters, concepts) are "social constructs" and thus "myths"? But is this a useful way of framing them?
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#m
- childless elites - Buddhist, Chinese, priesthood - something that goes "against evolution"
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trade
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#Claim : all Sapiens trade networks are based on fictions
- trust in fictional entities like dollars, totemic trademarks of corporations
- when two strangers in a tribal society want to trade, they will often establish trust by appealing to a common god, mythical ancestor or totem animal (l. 591)
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#Claim : all Sapiens trade networks are based on fictions
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basically letting us "evolve" much faster than genetic evolution
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"The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call ‘cultures’. Once cultures appeared, they never ceased to change and develop, and these unstoppable alterations are what we call ‘history’.
- this is when history and biology separates. It’s a mistake to compare an individual human with an individual chimpanzee… comparing 10-100-1000 the differences are much larger
- relationship to games - "The whole of history takes place within the bounds of this biological arena. However this arena is extraordinarily large, allowing Sapiens to play an astounding variety of games. Thanks to their ability to invent fiction, Sapiens create more and more complex games, which each generation develops and elaborates further".
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100,000 years ago, sapiens went to Levant, but failed and retreated.
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3: A day in the life of Adam and Eve
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lives as hunter-gatherers until last 12,000 years - shaped our habits, conflicts and sexuality?
- obesity - gorging gene
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collective fatherhood? ancient commune hypothesis - nuclear family is difficult, divorce
- others argue nuclear family was traditional - and is found in almost all current societies
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difficult to learn about them -
- they had very few artefacts, only stone/metal has survived
- current hunter/gatherers are influenced by society around them, and are usually in geographical areas with difficult climatic conditions/terrain
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they differ a lot from each other
- in Australia, 300-700,000 aboriginal hunter-gatherers, in 200-600 tribes, with on language, religion, norms, customs
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#Claim : Ever since the cognitive revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.
- strong argument for social constructivism - everything is socially constructed? gender, family, work… Communist utopia is possible? Everyone could be happy under fascism? #m
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but some generalities
- several dozen to several hundred individuals
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only domesticated animal before agricultural revolution: dog (15,000 years ago)
- hunting/fighting, alarm system
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while some interactions between tribes, mostly completely isolated and independent #Claim
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trading restricted to prestige items (shells), not staples like fruit and meat
- no evidence that tribe depended on import/export for survival
- average human encountered no more than a few hundred humans during life
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mostly migratory
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exceptionally with very rich food sources, bands settled down in seasonal or permanent camps
- drying, smoking, freezing food
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permanent fishing villages were the first permanent settlements in history, far before agricultural revolution
- on coast of Indonesian islands 45,000 years ago
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exceptionally with very rich food sources, bands settled down in seasonal or permanent camps
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trading restricted to prestige items (shells), not staples like fruit and meat
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mostly gathering, less hunting (in terms of calories)
- required a detailed map of the territory, seasons etc, which foods were nourishing/made you sick
- very fit, attuned to environment, in control of own body
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"better life than modern man"
- healthier, shorter work hours, more interesting
- high child mortality, but if you survived, could make it to 60 even 80
- We know extremely little about them - ‘shroud of silence’ - but they shaped landscapes… Visiting remote Sibir we think it’s pristine, but foragers brought dramatic changes even to densest jungles and desolate wilderness.
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lives as hunter-gatherers until last 12,000 years - shaped our habits, conflicts and sexuality?
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4: The flood
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Journey of first humans to Australia (45,000 years ago) is one of the most important events in history
- shows advanced seafaring and navigation skills
- first time humans managed to leave Afro-Asian ecological system
- first time humans became top of food chain and transformed beyond recognition
- lots of big animals - with a few thousand years, they all vanished. Food chains completely reorganized
- same happened in New Zealand with megafauna
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how could we be so destructive with stone age tools?
- large animals breed slowly, few offspring
- not evolved to fear/escape humans
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had mastered fire agriculture
- eucalyptus was rare in Australia - resistant to fire, spread wide
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Reachest Western hemisphere (America) 16,000 years ago
- walked from Siberia to Alaska
- 14,000 years ago ice melted (glaciers), allowed easier access
- by 10,000 BC humans already inhabited the southern point of America, Tierra del Fuego
- within 2,000 years of arrival, most unique species were gone
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Journey of first humans to Australia (45,000 years ago) is one of the most important events in history