Sapiens is a grand history of mankind from a perspective of 100 kilometers up. It is fun and readable, and ably synthesizes several theorists. It is also likely wrong in detail, pessimistic in outlook, and derivative of previous scholarship without doing much to situate itself as advancing the scholarly debate.

Harari begins boldly enough, noting that as recently as 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was just one of several hominid species on Earth, and qualitatively no different from any other mid-sized animal. We had tool use, but so did erectus, social structures, but so did neanderthalensis. And as far as food chains went, humans were pretty squarely in the middle. While anatomically modern humans existed as far back as 200,000 years ago, Harari deems the thing that changed somewhere between 70,000 and 30,000 years in the past the cognitive revolution. Language became more fluid, capable of encompassing a category of things that do not exist, and coordinating the actions of large numbers of loosely related groups. Culture, in all it's varieties, bloomed, and with it came massive extinctions, as the suddenly superior sapiens wiped out all other hominids, and the megafauna of the Americas and Australia.

The next revolution was the agricultural revolution. Wheat, barley, rice, and potatoes enabled settled agriculturalists to massively increase their population density. Agricultural communities had kings, laws, and armies, which they used to push back the hunter-gatherer society. This revolution was, as Harari puts it, the greatest fraud in history. Population increased 10-fold, but quality of life declined, as people worked longer hours and suffered more famine, more violence, more oppression. This greatest fraud was recapitulated again and again, in the scientific revolution which turned ignorance into a resource to be exploited, the capitalist credit revolution which made the future itself fertile terrain, and the industrial revolution, which turned the fossil resources of past eons into fuel for the capitalist engine.

The nature of scientific and technological revolutions is something which I actually know a thing or two about (at least if you trust the PhD after my name), and while the general arc of Harari's narrative isn't incorrect, in any specific detail of when knowledge and/or technology changed, and the forces behind it, his facts are firmly in the "lies for children" range of what is accepted. But even he admits that. To paraphrase, history cannot answer "why", and the more that you know about the actual circumstances of a period, the less confident you are in explanations.

I understand this a popular book, and so it's not really about being placed in any sort of scholarly discourse, but I feel like I read this book already. Here's the part lifted from Dawkins, here's Jared Diamond, hello David Graeber, nice to see you Francis Fukuyama. And this would be okay, except that Harari fails to stake out a unique position of his own. He foregrounds culture, and particularly intersubjective imaginaries (things that people as a group believe in; religions, nations, laws, corporations, scientific theories), but fails to press forward either a critique or apologia for the dominant humanist ideologies of capitalism and liberal humanism. Harari is pessimist about the basic premise of progress, but buys into Steven Pinker's framing that qualitatively things are getting better. He argues for the importance of biological and evolutionary approaches to quality of life, while saying that human happiness is both the key to everything and a neurochemical illusion.

And most of all, the overall framing is just a less ambitious version of Charles Stross' theory of history (on a blog post I cannot find right now). I love the shit out of Charlie, but he's a Scottish scifi author, and Sapiens is racking up the big awards and blurbs. Be more interesting.