My endeavor to review Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time is, from now on, advancing one chapter at a time.
In the last post, we finished Chapter 2. But I stopped short of facing every claim about Neanderthal cognition, or purported lack thereof, that Harari used to support the narrative that sapiens killed them off. And, on top of that, the idea that sapiens did so thanks to the unique ability to conceive and believe fictions, which Harari says is why humans cooperate like no other creature. We are here because of fictions. Neanderthals are not here because they lacked fictions.
But how could we know? Lets just forget the fact that earthlings galore, from algae to alligators, that lack fictions are everywhere. Let's focus, instead, only on this narrative about Neanderthals lacking the fictions that made sapiens the winners. How could we know they lacked fictions, or that any ancient hominin did? People today do all sorts of fiction/ myth/ abstract reasoning without leaving any material evidence of their ability or behavior, let alone of the kind that would preserve for tens of thousands of years or more.
For example, just because there is archaeological evidence for long distance transport of fancy materials (like obsidian) and its trade, and just because this behavior is only associated with sapiens, that does not mean that how we do trade today is how trade was done by the sapiens of deep time--as Harari describes in Ch. 2, with strangers trusting one another because of shared fictions/ myths/ imagined realities. So, not even the archaeology of trade is evidence of fictions/ myths. But reading the last few pages of Chapter 2 sure makes it seem like it.
You'd never guess from reading this book, but we cannot know whether Neanderthals possessed a capacity for fictions/ myths/ abstract reasoning on par with, or in the neighborhood, of contemporaneous sapiens. And that's partly because we cannot actually know about the capacity for fictions/ myths/ abstract reasoning in minds of those ancient sapiens, either. Even if we could know all that about their minds, we could not know how inherited biology factored into fiction and, in turn, how fictions played into sapiens' survival and reproduction of that inherited biology, or how any of that on the part of sapiens affected the fate of the Neanderthals (who are increasingly tough to write off as having been killed off or even died off, given the evidence from ancient DNA that we are descended from them).
If this stuff really revs your engine, then I apologize for not dwelling more on it during Chapter 2. But my treatment of fictions wore itself out.
Sure, yes, reading through what we do and do not know, and pondering what we can and cannot know, about Neanderthals and ancient Sapiens is fascinating. So we could have used those pages in Ch. 2 as inspiration to go and do just that. If you haven't already read it, then check out Rebecca Wragg Sykes' Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death, and art.
But chasing down evidence to support or not support Harari's claims about ancient sapiens is, for our purposes, a wild goose chase given the larger, never-verifiable, never-knowable-with-science narrative that the claims serve. Again, the evidence in hand really isn't important because it cannot actually verify the grand human evolutionary fictions about sapiens/ human nature in Harari's book (and elsewhere).
And just before Chapter 2 ended, Harari cranked up the story. He claimed that before sapiens there was no culture. He doesn't put it exactly like that, but he writes that "The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology. Until [then], the doings of all human species belonged to the realm of biology..."
Not only does this framing draw a line--dividing a connected continuum of hominin existence over time--despite there being no evidence of such a thing. But it also asserts unknowable (and pretty nonsense) claims so confidently. That framing, giving culture only to sapiens and relegating all prior existence to biology, underestimates the complexity of ancient hominin existence prior to 70,000 years ago. It also excludes that of other living species, like chimpanzees, who behave culturally, according to tradition or trends that are, conceivably, just as independent from biology as so much human behavior that we include in human culture. Leaf sponges. Self-tickling. Not-so-secret handshakes. Bonkers reactions to rainstorms and freakouts over big trees. Fashionable dress.
Divorcing only humans, only "sapiens", from biology (which, as we have seen in earlier pages, is an outdated hyper-genetically-determined version of biology's connection to social behavior) is only a rhetorical device, to astound, to wow, to make the familiar (being human) all at once strange, or special in a fresh way. To achieve the numinous without need of the supernatural.
And why, not? As he elegantly describes, there is plenty about sapiens to be astounded about!
And on that note, let's dig into Chapter 3: A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve.
Of course, it's another metaphor. Another Biblical one. I recently learned from Gillian Beer in Darwin's Plots that Darwin removed then returned "the Creator" in descriptions of evolution in different editions of Origin of Species. Evolutionary thinking has a long history of appropriating Genesis. Anyway, this metaphor is a familiar one, yes, but it's suddenly very strange...
And strange for new and exciting reasons compared to anything we've encountered so far in this book. Strange because.... while this chapter seems to be about describing life for ancient early sapiens, it's actually about how we cannot.
And yet... apparently none of that wisdom applied to our discussions of earlier periods of time in hominin existence, and still does not apply to what this book needs to be distinct between Neanderthals and sapiens (and all other species and sapiens). And, on top of that, if you don't read the whole chapter, and if you don't really take in the wisdom about what we cannot know, then you're liable to come away with some half-cocked idea of what life was like for early sapiens, probably one that fits your existing views of human nature. Either that or you're liable to come away pissed off that Harari sets up this chapter like we're going to know something only to, later, say we cannot.
See, in the photo, how I couldn't help but begin bantering with the first sentence?
He writes, "To understand our nature, history, and psychology, we must get inside the heads of our hunter-gatherer ancestors."
At that, I scribbled, "Via pure imagination!" and "scientifically impossible!"
And you can imagine how put off I was by the next several paragraphs where he writes as if the “‘gorging gene’ theory” is true. And then, regarding the question about whether early sapiens were monogamous or more communal about sex, he writes, “In order to resolve this controversy and understand our sexuality, society and politics, we need to learn something about the living conditions of our ancestors, to examine how Sapiens lived between the Cognitive Revolution of 70,000 years and the start of the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago.”
But as we read on in the very next graf, we realize that he's thinking the same thing as I was from the very start. On page 42 he writes, “Unfortunately, there are few certainties regarding the lives of our forager ancestors." (And, I'm not sure we're told what any of those few certainties are.)
In this book, Harari has a way of making arguments that are clearly arguments, but also making arguments which are only rhetorical. The latter are presented as fact in the moment. It’s like someone came along and deleted every perhaps, probably, likely, maybe, theoretically, and as the thinking goes. So, once we're a few pages into this chapter and, especially, towards the end of it, having taken Harari’s first sentence at face value feels like an idiotic blunder. My exclamations graffitied on that first page seem ridiculous because he was with me all along. So, all his cool explanation of what should come with perhaps, probably, likely, maybe, theoretically, and as the thinking goes actually, in hindsight, kind of looks like he’s trolling those ideas. Whether or not he’s trolling the scholarship and science, for the reader the experience is frustrating. Ideally, it would be humbling, which can be both edifying and awe-inspiring (and I think it still is to the people who don’t read this chapter carefully or critically), but instead it’s even a little infuriating (to anyone reading with a sharp eye).
Trust me, I'm not defensive. I don't feel attacked, as some students have said, by Harari's writing style. It's just that I've seen how troubling it is for them. Some of that is their youth and inexperience. They see books as sacred sources of information and come to books, especially books assigned by professors, to find ANSWERS. With Sapiens, they can feel tricked or betrayed or simply annoyed. Some don't even notice any of this, which is a problem. Not noticing, I think, is part of the tendency to accept an assertion from the start and then barely notice the caveats, backtracking, complexity, or outright rejection to follow. Good reading comprehension means following changing ideas, and changing your own along with or in opposition to the author, but bad reading comprehension and confirmation bias, together, are working to cement these ideas in Sapiens (like “gorging gene theory”) as facts rather than ideas to ponder, I think. And then the students with good reading comprehension, who are trained to find answers, express their frustration because they feel duped both by Harari and, by extension, the fields he’s conveying. Those fields don’t seem to be very successful at knowing anything we’re primed, especially by this book Sapiens, to think we should know. All this and more is why this book sparked such great conversation in the classroom.
How hard or easy was it to be a forager? How peaceful or war-mongering were our early sapiens ancestors? How religious? Not only are we told that there is a “horizon of possibilities” as answers to these questions, and that “there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.” But we’re also told, explicitly, that we cannot know the answers to questions like those. Most answers are “castles in the air, connected to the ground by the thin strings of meagre archaeological remains and anthropological observations of present-day foragers.” Archaeological finds “are both scarce and opaque.” And, actually, we can’t know the title of the chapter (A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve) because of “the curtain of silence” that is the unobservable past.
“If the larger picture of ancient forager life is hard to reconstruct, particular events are largely irretrievable. When a Sapiens band first entered a valley inhabited by Neanderthals, the following years might have witnessed a breathtaking historical drama. Unfortunately, nothing world have survived from such an encounter except, at best, a few fossilized bones and a handful of stone tools that remain mute under the most intense scholarly inquisitions. We may extract from them information about human anatomy, human technology, human diet, and perhaps even human social structure. But they reveal nothing about the political alliance forged between neighbouring Sapiens bands, about the spirits of the dead that blessed this alliance, or about the ivory beads secretly given to the local witch doctor in order to secure the blessing of the spirits. This curtain of silence shrouds tens of thousands of years of history…”
What happens if we retroactively apply this perspective to the preceding chapters? Does any of the argument hold up about the lives and psyches of ancient hominins, especially Neanderthals? About a cognitive revolution separating sapiens from all others? About our evolved us-vs.-them psychology? I wonder how he would defend chapters 1 and 2 given what he wrote in chapter 3.
And here’s the clincher: despite, like I said, this chapter sharing so much wisdom about what we cannot know, it ends by setting up the next chapter with the presumption that we can.
“Scholars tend not ask only those questions that they can reasonably expect to answer.[…] Yet, it is vital to ask questions for which no answers are available, otherwise we might be tempted to dismiss 60,000 to 70,000 years of human history with the excuse that ‘the people who lived back then did nothing of importance.’”
It sounds like he’s talking about what’s vital to science and scholarship. If so I heartily disagree. Asking questions for which no answers are available is for art, answering them about our ancestors is fiction. Those endeavors are beyond worthwhile! But good lord. What another turn to end this chapter. We start with the presumption that we’re going to know how the Adam and Eves of reality really were. Then our imaginations are seeded with rich imagery but we are told we cannot know. Then we’re told that we should go ahead and imagine what we cannot know, but without making the case for the arts, here, so it reads like we’re still talking about science.
Well well well. My little freakout at the first sentence doesn’t look so silly anymore, now, does it?
