I'm reviewing Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time.
Harari's portrayal of human evolution as an epic psychological drama forms the basis for this book's conception of human nature, which forms the basis for this book's narrative about history, science, tech, and the future.
It's an understatement to say that lots of readers like it.
Perhaps they like it because it's a story they've heard before (from the Bible, Rousseau, Hobbes, so many of their religious leaders, political leaders, and college professors, and so on). And perhaps it's a story that they've already accepted to be true. And, so, perhaps they are comforted or thrilled by Harari's rendition, with added fossils!
I think there's just something about being told who you are...
So far we've had some hints, but today's pages tell us WHO YOU ARE.
You are a bone-smashing carrion-eating underdog, and not the good kind.
And you didn't even give him your birthday or your palm. How did he know??????
Calm down. It's probably just more metaphors...
Page 11
Coming off the last page, we've got an appreciation for the long human childhood and all the socializing that entails. All the cooperation over all that time, while a kid's big-brained body is molded by complex cumulative culture (that's entangled with the environment) that the kid was born into. By being born into that world, the kid becomes part of and dependent on it. It's absolutely mind-blowing when you think about it.
Harari is right to say it feels impossible not to assume that this phenomenon is responsible for what we do, what we're like, right now. Okay.
But then there's an urge to not just to wonder when it all began, but to assume that what preserves from the ancient past tells us when that was (or ever could). He refers specifically to "a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures." And then just assumes that "humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years."
Fact check: Brains the size of ours today did not emerge until after 500,000 years ago. So, regarding brains, Harari is talking about having a larger brain than before. It's misleading.
Then, sure, tools. But the record could be missing so much tool use across the entirety of hominin evolution because of preservation issues. Stone is hearty, but so many more materials make great tools.
Superior learning abilities aren't preserved unless you want to talk about learning to make stone tools, so... okay. But is that superior learning or the same learning but with superior hands? How could we know? There are no Homo erectuses to cage up or to stalk with binoculars.
And, finally, complex social structures? He must be assuming that with larger brains comes more dependent babies with longer childhoods and that whatever it is to care for them is "complex social structure." That's not only debatable but, again, it's not verifiable because it's really not preserved.
So while it's basically habit among scientists and scholars to point to two million years ago as the beginning of a new phase in hominin evolutionary history, to assert with no nuance what he already asserted isn't great.
But then, to assert that during this time hominins "remained weak and marginal creatures" is just going too far.
Perhaps, he's simply recounting the backlash to Raymond Dart's "killer ape" view of human evolution. C.K. Brain and others helped to expose the problems with calling fossilized fragments of antelope bones weapons. Sure those bone fragments could be used as weapons but there was no way to say that they were.
Plus, there were examples of hominins falling prey to carnivores. So, the narrative could just as easily be that australopiths were "weak and marginal creatures" and maybe that's what Harari is carrying over and up into the genus Homo, in the last 2 million years. But there is simply no evidence to support this depiction of hominins over any other. All we know is that they were as good at leaving descendents as all the other animals who did.
He says that our ancestors over the last 2 million years "lived in constant fear of predators." It's an engaging way to remind us what life was like. I for one would not want my flux capacitor to fail me in the Pleistocene. So... okay, constant fear.
But now I have to pick it apart, literally, even if it was meant more rhetorically. Have you seen a herd of animals, like zebras, when there is a known predator nearby? It's in all the nature documentaries. It doesn't look like fear; it looks like vigilance. And then, if chased or eaten, then there's the fear, but that's not living in constant fear, that's momentary.
Let's ignore the confident assertions about what Homo erectus hunted and ate, and how frequently they ate what. Let's just skip to the fun he has (and we can have) drilling down on the fact that these hominins used stone tools to bash open animal bones for their marrow. Yes. And if you haven't spread roasted bone marrow on toast, then you don't know what you're missing.
But, does such a lifestyle really earn Homo erectus the description of weak, marginal, and fearful? I'm not saying they were badass but I'm saying that saying they were badass is just as easy as saying they were weak, marginal, and fearful. So what does that mean? It means we're not talking about facts. We're talking about feelings.
What kind of animal, like ever, in the history of earth is weak, marginal, and fearful? Who exists well enough to keep existing like that? Resorting to a life of stealing from top predators--if indeed this was a big part of hominin history (and not some overhyped aspect due to its preservation over so much other behavior)--was just as good as doing what those carnivores were doing (which often includes carrion-eating, by the way).
So, what makes bashing bone marrow lesser than clubbing bratwurst? (What a horrible attempt to make my title make sense. I'm not sorry. It's what I hear in my head as writing this post.)
Why rank behavior? Oh, that's just how evolutionary storytelling has traditionally done things, I suppose The past was worse. Progress is how things work. Evolution is when advantages over the past take over and become typical. So the thinking has gone and, unfortunately, so the thinking still goes.
Well, if the past was so bad, then how on earth is the present?
Now, here's a sentence that escaped my grumpy pen on the page. Get a load of this:
"This is a key to understanding our history and psychology."
"This" being his imagineered day in the life of a hominin with half-to-three-quarters of our current brain size imbued with how he would feel as a carcass-stealing bone-smasher. It's science fiction. Science fiction is great! It's fun! It offers truths that science cannot! HOWEVER, right now, on this page, science fiction is "key to understanding our history and psychology."
Should it be? Isn't this believed to be, even purported to be, a science book?
In the last graf (which spills over onto page 12), he asserts that other lineages who evolved to be top predators, like sharks and lions, did so much more gradually than we did. Even if you could carefully make this case with evidence, like, about the timing bit, you'd run into a problem with the next part:
Those animals kept their mental health, as a result. But us? We are traumatized, like, in our evolved psychology.
Page 12
Why was our ancestors' ecological shift a problem? It happened so fast that "humans themselves failed to adjust." We suffer from underdog mentality? Those bone-bashers had underdog mentality? And, he's saying, we still carry it forward despite, now, being masters of the planet. And so, that makes us like "banana republic dictators" who are "full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous"... like... as a species... in our evolved psychology.
And maybe readers read this as all metaphor.
Or maybe they read it with a grain of salt.
And so when they see him end this section by once again emphasizing how fast these changes in our ancestors ecology occurred, then maybe they think we're back to facts and that he's got a point.
But this is the dangerous part! Because even calling it a "hasty jump" is not a fact, it's meaning made of some evidence, not all of which he has a very good command of (as we've seen on previous pages).
What am I saying? I'm saying that he's getting away with armchair psychoanalysis of long dead people and with imputing their ghosts into our bodies, by occaisionally dropping facts and ideas that sound like facts.
There are readers who will just agree with his story about our psychology and there are readers who won't, but for the latter, how much of that rhetoric are they absorbing anyway? And how much are they habituating to the science fiction in these early pages? How much engaging storytelling is wearing down their ability to identify it as separate from the facts as the book proceeds?
The rest of page 12 is next. To be continued...
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