Ecce homo

Sapiens: a brief history of mankind, Yuval Noah Harari, Harvill Secker; Rs.210, Pages 433 This is a truly extraordinary book — a comprehensive history of the origin and evolution of the human race. Inevitably, it hasn’t received the media and public attention it should have in this country where reading and knowledge are of peripheral interest. Yet Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind lives up to its effusive book jacket encomiums (“thrilling and breathtaking”, “full of shocking and wondrous stories”, “starburst of a book”). Although it’s the history of the origin of the species homo sapiens which over 2.5 million years since the genus homo first evolved on Planet Earth, and broke away to further evolve as homo sapiens 200,000 years ago and today dominates the world like a colossus, the redeeming feature of this biological and socio-economic history of human kind, is that Yuval Noah Harari, who teaches history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has resisted the temptation to sing congratulatory praises of the wondrous ‘progress’ of humankind. On the contrary, he expresses healthy contempt for the revolutionary achievements and all-conquering dominance of homo sapiens, and seldom misses an opportunity to remind the reader that deep down, this species driven by insatiable greed and self-interest has decimated thousands of life forms to extinction and may well be on the brink of self-destruction. Indeed, perhaps the most valuable contribution to our understanding of the human condition — one of the imperatives of the newly emergent global community of homo sapiens connected 24X7 by the Internet, instant telecommunication and ease of jet travel — made by Harari is that we need to start thinking about global, rather than national, prosperity and survival. In his telling “timeline of history”, Harari reminds us that homo sapiens is a parvenu on the 4.5 billion- year-old Planet Earth, having evolved in East Africa only 200,000 years ago, and that humankind’s early cognitive capabilities became discernible a mere 70,000 years ago. Moreover, he advances the theory that the 67,000 years our ancestors spent as itinerant bands of hunter-gatherers living in small mutually supportive communities before mankind’s discovery of agriculture 10,000 years ago, may have been the happiest years of the human race. Indeed, he describes the earth’s agriculture revolution, widely lauded as the beginning of civilisation, as “history’s biggest fraud” and the starting point of the descent of mankind. According to Harari, invention of organised farming of wheat and goats which began in the hill regions of south-eastern Turkey, western Iran and the Levant a mere 10,000 years ago, opened a Pandora’s box for humankind. It prompted demarcation of properties for farming, the need for man-made laws to protect property rights which led to leaders of strongest bands of marauders becoming kings and emperors, who introduced systems of appropriation of portions of farmers’ produce as taxes to feed their soldiers. The agriculture revolution also sparked a population explosion (more hands were needed to work farms) and the conquest of fertile neighbouring territories — later known…