Recently, I read a book called Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. This is one of the most informative books I have read about human history. We have been learning history through our school education since childhood, but this book is totally different. It gives a new perspective on human history.

While reading each chapter, it changed the way I think about the world and its problems. Everyone should read this book when they get a chance. But for those of you who want to get a glimpse of this book, here I am trying to explain each chapter with my philosophical point of view. Let’s begin this journey from here.

An Animal of No Significance – A scavenger animal that lived on this planet for millions of years

Scavengers

Indeed, it is true—we were once an animal of no significance. One tricky point here is the term we, because it may include other kinds of human species that we lost, either intentionally or unintentionally, in the course of history.

About 2.5 million years ago, we were just animals scavenging forests for food. We hunted small game and mostly preferred easy food that we could get without much fighting. So we can say that we were animals living in the middle of the food chain.

But suddenly, everything changed. We moved from the middle to the top of the food chain very quickly. It happened so fast that nature and other animals didn’t get enough time to adapt to these drastic changes. This created immense misery for other animals and also for other kinds of human species.

We all know that when humans gain tremendous power, they tend to use it to their advantage without considering the consequences. Even if it wasn’t intentional, we have been hurting most of the animals that have lived alongside us on this planet for millions of years.

The Human Brain

Around 2.5 million years ago, we started walking upright, created mostly wooden or stone tools, and began growing our brains. Walking upright enabled us to see large land areas with better visibility, giving us an advantage, and tools helped us with small day-to-day tasks.

But we still don’t clearly know why our brains started growing. Today, scientists tell us that our brain weighs only about 2–3 percent of our body weight, but it accounts for more than 20 percent of our daily total energy. This is the real growth we have achieved over the past 2.5 million years.

This clearly put us at an advantage over other animal species, but similar growth also started happening in other human species. How come they didn’t survive? That’s a very big question, and we don’t have a clear answer—only speculations.

About 300 thousand years ago, humans (in this blog, I use the term humans to specify all kinds of human species, following the author’s terminology) started using fire on a daily basis. There are speculations that eating cooked food made us spend less energy on digestion and more energy on thinking and socializing. This idea is also linked to our smaller intestines and could be one of the reasons for our brain development.

But without concrete proof, we can’t define anything clearly.

Where did they go?

In the course of history, more than one kind of human species lived on this planet at the same time. To name a few: Neanderthals, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo floresiensis, and a few others.

But where did they go? How did we lose all of them?

The author puts it nicely:

“They were too familiar to ignore, yet too different to tolerate.”

This line explains many present-day problems as well, such as racism, casteism, and many more.

There are two main theories behind this. One group of scholars says that we committed mass genocide against them. Another group says that some of them might have merged with human species through reproduction, and that we lost some of them without any significant human intervention.

Both theories might be partially true, but we don’t have a clear answer to these questions.

So if some advantages placed us at a different level from other species, what differentiated us from other human species? The important thing is that at that time, Neanderthals had brains and social development very similar to ours. They were even physically stronger than us.

How did we manage to outlive these brainy social giants? The upcoming chapters will try to explore this question. The author says that Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks, above all, to its unique language.

My View

In this blog we have seen that we were just scavengers for more than 2 million years. There was no intentional focus on developing our brain in this time period. Whatever happened to us, it happened automatically through some random events. My question is why did this only happen to Homo Sapiens not to any other human or animal species?

Another question that sparks my mind is what restricts the universe from creating similar or totally different kinds of life forms in any other solar system? Why aren’t we so eager about exploring the other parts of the universe to enquire about this? Rather we are still fighting over the man made problems as dumb species. Are we really as smart as we think?

In the upcoming blog we will see how we went from an animal of no significance to the most significant one. Thank you for reading.