When Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens was first published in Hebrew in 2011 and later in English in 2014, it took the nonfiction world by storm. An ambitious, provocative synthesis of anthropology, biology, and world history, the book quickly became a bestseller, translated into more than 65 languages. Its popularity was boosted by endorsements from figures such as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. It spent years on the New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the best books of the 2010s by The Guardian.
Harari holds a PhD in history from Oxford and teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In Sapiens, he offers a broad-brush account of human history, built around three major revolutions: the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific. The book’s strength lies in its clarity, narrative flow, and ability to ask sweeping philosophical questions. That same breadth, however, has drawn criticism. Scholars such as anthropologist Christopher Hallpike have accused it of oversimplifying complex anthropological debates, and others have challenged its speculative tone. Yet even its critics admit that Harari’s work stimulates vital discussion about the trajectory of Homo sapiens.
Part I: The Cognitive Revolution
Part I of the book deals with the Cognitive Revolution, a transformation in Homo sapiens’ mental abilities that occurred roughly 70,000 years ago—when humans learned to imagine, believe, and collaborate at a scale unmatched by any other species.
Chapter 1 – An Animal of No Significance
Harari opens by reminding us that for most of their existence, Homo sapiens were just another species in the middle of the food chain.
“About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being… about 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures.”
At this point in history, there were several different human species—including Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus. Homo sapiens had no particular claim to dominance. They were physically unimpressive, surviving by foraging and scavenging.
So how did one species among many come to dominate the entire planet?
Chapter 2 – The Tree of Knowledge
Around 70,000 years ago, something extraordinary began to happen. Homo sapiens underwent a Cognitive Revolution—a mysterious development in brain function that gave rise to new language abilities, abstract thinking, and above all, the capacity to believe in shared fictions. This ability to cooperate flexibly in large groups was unique.
“The truly unique feature of our language,” Harari writes, “is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all.”
This new capacity allowed Homo sapiens to imagine gods, nations, money, and laws—concepts that only exist in collective belief. With this, Sapiens began to outcompete all other human species. Groups that could organize in hundreds or thousands—based on myth—were far more powerful than kin-based groups of 50 or so.
Harari calls these imagined orders the basis of intersubjective reality: unlike objective facts (like gravity) or subjective experiences (like pain), intersubjective myths exist only when multiple minds believe in them.
“There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings,” he writes.
These fictions made possible large-scale cooperation, trade, legal systems, and eventually empires. Harari contends that they are still the glue of civilization today.
Chapter 3 – A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve
To challenge modern assumptions, Harari reconstructs the lifestyle of forager societies—those who lived before the advent of agriculture. He argues that, contrary to the image of the “nasty, brutish and short” existence, foragers likely had more balanced diets, lower risk of starvation, and more leisure time than early agriculturalists.
“Foragers usually worked fewer hours than modern people, and they spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways,” he explains.
They enjoyed diverse foods and close-knit social lives, and they were more in tune with their environments than most people today.
However, this lifestyle left few material traces. Foragers built little that lasted, and they did not leave behind temples or fortresses. Yet they shaped the world profoundly.
“Long before the Agricultural Revolution,” Harari notes, “Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to extinction.”
Chapter 4 – The Flood
With the Cognitive Revolution enabling migration and complex social organization, Homo sapiens spread across continents—from Africa into Eurasia, Australia, and finally the Americas. Harari argues that this expansion triggered mass extinctions of megafauna across the globe.
In Australia, the arrival of humans around 45,000 years ago coincided with the disappearance of giant marsupials, birds, and reptiles. Harari believes this was no coincidence. He describes this as
“the first big thing that Homo sapiens did was to spread across the world—and that was followed closely by mass extinction.”
This pattern repeated elsewhere. As Sapiens entered North America around 15,000 years ago, the continent’s large mammals—mammoths, sabertooths, giant ground sloths—vanished soon after. Whether by overhunting or disrupting ecosystems, Homo sapiens became the most lethal species in history.
Harari compares this wave of extinctions to a “human blitzkrieg”—a campaign of environmental transformation so profound that it rivals any later impact of industrial civilization.
Part II: The Agricultural Revolution
Why settling down made us powerful—and miserable
After exploring how Homo sapiens became cognitively dominant through myth, language, and social cooperation, Harari turns to the next turning point in human history: the Agricultural Revolution, which began around 12,000 years ago. Contrary to the romantic image of human “progress,” Harari argues that farming brought both population growth and suffering. While it allowed humans to manipulate ecosystems more effectively, it also trapped them in cycles of hard labor, social inequality, and environmental exploitation.
Chapter 5 – History’s Biggest Fraud
Harari begins bluntly:
“The Agricultural Revolution is history’s biggest fraud.”
While it increased the amount of food available, it did not necessarily improve the quality of life for individuals. Foragers had lived in varied, mobile, and often egalitarian societies. Agriculture, by contrast, led to sedentary life, disease, and hierarchies.
He points out that humans didn’t domesticate wheat—wheat domesticated humans. Sapiens began to settle not because it was easier, but because it supported more offspring.
“The body of Homo sapiens paid the price,” Harari writes. “Agriculture left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers.”
Instead of enjoying a diverse diet and flexible work, early farmers toiled long hours on a few staple crops. Their diets became nutritionally poorer, and their bones and teeth deteriorated. Meanwhile, the concentration of people in permanent settlements led to the first large-scale outbreaks of infectious disease.
Yet farming spread. Why? Because it allowed more people to survive, even if it made life worse for each individual. In Harari’s words:
“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”
Once you settle, you can’t easily go back.
Chapter 6 – Building Pyramids
Farming led to surpluses, and surpluses led to hierarchies. Harari explains how agricultural societies became increasingly stratified, with kings, priests, soldiers, scribes, and slaves. Religion and myth now served a new function: legitimizing power.
He argues that large-scale cooperation requires shared myths not just about gods, but also about social order.
“There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run toward freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.”
Examples abound: the Code of Hammurabi presented a divinely sanctioned class structure in Babylon; the Declaration of Independence asserts universal equality, even though its authors excluded women, slaves, and Indigenous people. Harari highlights the paradox of human rights, noting that concepts like liberty and equality exist only in shared imagination.
These myths were powerful enough to coordinate tens of thousands of people in cities and empires. But they also created rigid social distinctions, justified inequality, and enshrined suffering as part of the cosmic order.
Chapter 7 – Memory Overload
With complex societies came the challenge of storing and managing information. Oral tradition was no longer sufficient. The solution was the invention of writing, first developed in Sumer around 3000 BCE—not for literature, but for bookkeeping.
“Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is rapidly becoming its master,” Harari warns.
Scripts like cuneiform evolved to track taxes, harvests, debts, and ownership—not poems or prayers.
This development marked a profound cognitive shift. Human memory was no longer the primary medium of knowledge. Bureaucracies, supported by writing, enabled empires to govern, tax, and control massive populations. The written word allowed institutions to outlive individuals, ensuring continuity and expansion.
Ironically, this explosion of information did not make people wiser—it made systems smarter. Writing increased coordination and power at the cost of individual memory, autonomy, and cultural fluidity.
Chapter 8 – There Is No Justice in History
Harari closes this section by confronting the moral cost of agricultural and hierarchical civilization.
“Different societies adopt different kinds of imagined orders, and their imagined orders define what is just and what is unjust.”
But throughout history, those born into elites have enjoyed privileges based not on merit but on arbitrary norms—class, race, caste, or gender.
He gives sobering examples: the caste system in India, slavery in the Americas, and the historical subjugation of women across civilizations. These were not aberrations; they were systemic features of complex societies. And while modern liberalism challenges these orders, it still rests on imagined stories like national identity, human rights, and consumer choice.
Harari insists we must recognize that justice is not a universal law, but a narrative upheld by power.
“There is no universal standard of justice,” he concludes. “All the stories that underpin the social orders are fictional.”
Part III: The Unification of Humankind
How commerce, conquest, and belief systems knitted humanity into a single global civilization
Following the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions, the next great transformation in human history, according to Harari, was the slow but relentless unification of humankind. Despite early diversity and isolation, human cultures gradually converged—into broader networks of exchange, imperial control, and shared ideologies. In Part III, Harari argues that much of history’s “progress” has been the story of this unification—driven by the rise of money, empires, and universal religions.
Chapter 9 – The Arrow of History
Harari begins by challenging the assumption that history is a random walk. Instead, he argues, it has followed a distinct direction: toward unity. Over thousands of years, isolated tribes evolved into kingdoms, and kingdoms merged into empires and global systems.
What explains this trend? The desire for order, trade, and meaning, Harari says. While cultures initially resisted assimilation, the benefits of exchange, peace, and cooperation often overrode local resistance.
He writes, “The arrow of history has been bent by countless conflicting forces, but it has always kept pointing in the same general direction: toward unity.”
As a result, today’s world is governed by fewer but larger political and cultural systems than ever before.
Chapter 10 – The Scent of Money
One of the strongest unifiers of humanity, Harari argues, is money. It is the most universally accepted story in human history: a shared fiction that allows strangers to cooperate without trust or shared values. “Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised,” he states.
Unlike religion or political ideology, money doesn’t discriminate. Christians can do business with Muslims, monarchs with republics, atheists with believers—because money speaks one language. Gold, silver, and later banknotes and digital currencies became the foundation of economic globalization.
Importantly, money is not based on objective value. Its power lies in shared belief.
“Money isn’t a material reality—it is a psychological construct,” Harari explains.
This makes it both fragile and immensely powerful.
Chapter 11 – Imperial Visions
Empires, for Harari, are the second major force unifying humankind. While often brutal and coercive, empires have historically spread languages, ideas, legal systems, and administrative structures across vast territories. From the Qin Dynasty to the Roman Empire, from the British Empire to the Islamic Caliphates, empires have absorbed diversity into a common political and cultural framework.
Harari defines empire not by size but by cultural hierarchy:
“An empire is a political order with two characteristics: first, it rules over a significant number of distinct peoples… and second, it has flexible borders and a potential for indefinite expansion.”
He acknowledges their violence and injustice, but also notes their role in enabling scientific, economic, and artistic growth. Paradoxically, many people now speak, think, and worship in ways shaped by imperial legacies—even while denouncing them.
Chapter 12 – The Law of Religion
The third great unifying force in history, Harari argues, is religion—systems of meaning that claim universal and eternal validity. Religion gave empires moral legitimacy, created shared values, and provided consolation amid life’s hardships.
Harari categorizes religions into three types:
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Animist (early forager beliefs),
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Polytheist (e.g., Greek, Roman, Hindu traditions),
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Monotheist (Judaism, Christianity, Islam),
and finally,
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Universalist natural law religions (like Buddhism and Stoicism).
What distinguishes modern religions, especially monotheistic ones, is their missionary impulse. They believe not only that their truth is valid, but that everyone else must accept it.
“The big innovation of monotheism wasn’t the belief in one god, but the insistence that this god was the only truth for all humans,” Harari observes.
Religions, like money and empire, create intersubjective reality. They produce large-scale cooperation, but also deep conflict—especially when rival truths compete for dominance.
Chapter 13 – The Secret of Success
To conclude this section, Harari asks: What enables these massive unifying systems—empires, religions, and markets—to succeed over time? His answer is adaptability.
“History is not deterministic, but some ideas and institutions are better at adapting and spreading.”
Successful unifiers—like the Roman legal system, Islamic civilization, or capitalism—have thrived not because they are morally superior, but because they are flexible, expansive, and good at incorporating outsiders.
Harari leaves us with a reflection: today’s global culture, shaped by centuries of unification, rests on hybrids. Nearly every nation-state, religion, or economic system in the modern world is an amalgam of earlier traditions, evolving myths, and pragmatic cooperation.
Part IV: The Scientific Revolution
How knowledge, capitalism, and human ambition redefined the future
The final part of Harari’s Sapiens traces the profound transformations unleashed by the Scientific Revolution, beginning around 500 years ago. For most of human history, knowledge was based on tradition and religious revelation. But with the rise of modern science, Harari argues, humans began to accept ignorance—not as a failure, but as a foundation for progress. This shift opened the door to technological mastery, capitalism, imperialism, and eventually the pursuit of immortality and godlike power.
Chapter 14 – The Discovery of Ignorance
The Scientific Revolution began not with new answers, but with a new admission:
“Modern science is based on the Latin injunction ignoramus—‘we do not know.’”
Harari emphasizes that this intellectual humility was revolutionary. Unlike premodern belief systems that claimed to know everything worth knowing, science flourished by embracing doubt, questioning dogma, and seeking testable theories.
He notes how this epistemological shift transformed our relationship to the future. For the first time, societies believed that progress was possible, and that future generations could surpass the present. This belief in the future laid the groundwork for technological innovation and economic expansion.
Chapter 15 – The Marriage of Science and Empire
Harari argues that the Scientific Revolution was inseparable from imperialism. European powers like Britain and Spain expanded their empires by mapping unknown lands, classifying native flora and fauna, and establishing control through technology and data.
“Science gave empires ideological justification and practical tools for conquest,” he writes.
The ship, the gun, and the printing press were not just products of innovation—they were tools of global domination. Science and empire formed a feedback loop: exploration fueled curiosity; curiosity fueled conquest. As Harari notes, Captain James Cook’s 18th-century voyages were as much about data-gathering as about territorial acquisition.
Chapter 16 – The Capitalist Creed
The third force in this triad of modernity—alongside science and empire—is capitalism. Harari explains how economic growth came to be seen not only as beneficial but morally necessary. He recounts the rise of credit, banking, joint-stock companies, and trust in the future as the cornerstones of capitalism.
Crucially, capitalism depends on faith in infinite growth.
“Capitalism began as a theory about how the economy functions,” he writes, “and ended up being a religion in its own right.”
Merchants and investors began to trust that tomorrow’s wealth would exceed today’s—justifying loans, interest, and long-term investment.
Harari also addresses capitalism’s dark side: colonialism, exploitation, and inequality. But he acknowledges its resilience and ability to adapt to crises—such as the 2008 financial crash, which shook but did not collapse the system.
Chapter 17 – The Wheels of Industry
Industrial capitalism further transformed human society by unleashing energy-intensive technologies. The Industrial Revolution allowed humans to convert coal, oil, and steam into labor-saving machines—multiplying productivity and enabling mass production.
Harari emphasizes how this revolution reshaped time, labor, and even family life. Cities grew, factories proliferated, and people increasingly lived according to the logic of the machine.
“The Industrial Revolution turned the timetable and the assembly line into fundamental principles of society.”
Alongside material prosperity came profound social dislocations. Harari describes how modern governments and corporations took on new roles in education, health care, transportation, and surveillance—creating what he calls the “modern social order.”
Chapter 18 – A Permanent Revolution
Modernity, Harari argues, is marked by perpetual change. Unlike ancient societies that prized stability, modern cultures celebrate disruption, innovation, and the new. But this comes at a psychological cost: alienation, uncertainty, and anxiety.
He writes, “The only thing we can be certain of is that the future will be very different from the present.”
In this world of permanent revolution, ideologies compete not to preserve order, but to accelerate transformation—be it liberalism, socialism, or nationalism.
Harari notes that even though this dynamism has delivered extraordinary advances in health, literacy, and material well-being, it has not necessarily made humans happier.
Chapter 19 – And They Lived Happily Ever After
Harari confronts the question: Has all this progress made us happier? The answer, he suggests, is ambiguous. While modern humans enjoy unprecedented physical security, comfort, and life expectancy, subjective well-being has not improved proportionally.
He cites research showing that happiness is more influenced by relationships, purpose, and mental health than by material conditions.
“Nothing in the comfortable lives of the average modern Westerner can approach the joy of a forager gathering mushrooms in a forest,” he provocatively writes.
In fact, consumer culture may even trap us in cycles of dissatisfaction, as we chase ever-higher benchmarks of success and consumption.
Chapter 20 – The End of Homo Sapiens
In his conclusion, Harari asks: What might replace Homo sapiens? With the rise of genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and neurotechnology, we may be on the brink of creating post-human entities.
He offers a chilling possibility: that the forces we have unleashed—especially biotech and data science—may render traditional human experience obsolete.
“We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power,” Harari warns.
The final question he leaves the reader with is not just what we will become—but whether we will remain recognizably human at all.
Final Reflection
Across four sweeping movements—the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions, and the Unification of Humankind—Harari’s Sapiens presents an unsettling yet illuminating picture of our species: one defined not by natural superiority, but by its capacity to invent and believe in shared fictions.
We shaped the Earth, built empires, cured diseases, and launched satellites. But we have also created ecological destruction, social inequality, and existential anxiety. As Harari suggests,
“We are more powerful than ever before, but have no clear idea what to do with that power.”
So let’s end with a reflection for discussion—perhaps in the circle, or in the comments below:
Have there been moments in your life when you deeply questioned one of the “shared stories” of your internal world—whether money, identity, success, religion, or even freedom? What happened, and how did it affect the way you live today?