The history of humans told as a story about shared stories

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Sapiens first came out in Hebrew in 2011, grew out of an introductory world history course he taught, and became an international bestseller after the English edition appeared in 2014.

The book covers the whole span of our species in a few hundred pages, organised around big turning points: the growth of human thinking and language, the move to farming, the forces that slowly joined humanity together, and the rise of modern science.

It is written to provoke. Harari often asks whether a change everyone calls progress actually made ordinary lives better.

The idea most readers remember is that large groups of strangers can cooperate because they share beliefs in things that are not physical: money, nations, laws, companies, gods. A banknote is paper, and a company is a legal agreement, yet both shape how millions of people act. Harari argues this ability is what lets humans organise at a scale no other animal can.

A second idea is that farming may have made life harder for most individuals, with more work, a narrower diet and more disease, even as it allowed far more people to live. The book keeps asking how we would measure whether people are happier now.

Historians and anthropologists have criticised the book for sweeping claims stated with more confidence than the evidence allows, especially about prehistoric life, and for some factual slips. It works best as a set of thought-provoking questions. Treat its answers as one historian's interpretation.

The idea behind this caseLesson: What a chatbot really does →

1. 1Pick one shared story you rely on every day, such as money or a contract, and notice how much depends on everyone believing in it.
2. 2When the book makes a big claim, ask yourself what evidence would be needed to prove it.
3. 3Read one review by a historian who disagrees with the book, to see where the debate is.