Sapiens📒

by Yuval Noah Harari
Part of Makro bookclub
References https://www.ynharari.com/sapiens-references/
Timeline of history #E: Time scales prehistoric timeline
- Years Before the Present
- 13.5 billion
- Matter and energy appear. Beginning of physics. Atoms and molecules appear. Beginning of chemistry.
- 4.5 billion
- Formation of planet Earth.
- 3.8 billion
- Emergence of organisms. Beginning of biology.
- 6 million
- Last common grandmother of humans and chimpanzees.
- 2.5 million
- Evolution of the genus Homo in Africa. First stone tools.
- 2 million
- Humans spread from Africa to Eurasia. Evolution of different human species.
- 500,000
- Neanderthals evolve in Europe and the Middle East.
- 300,000
- Daily usage of fire.
- 200,000
- Homo sapiens evolves in East Africa.
- 70,000
- The Cognitive Revolution. Emergence of fictive language.
- Beginning of history. Sapiens spread out of Africa.
- 45,000
- Sapiens settle Australia. Extinction of Australian megafauna.
- 30,000
- Extinction of Neanderthals.
- 16,000
- Sapiens settle America. Extinction of American megafauna.
- 13,000
- Extinction of Homo floresiensis. Homo sapiens the only surviving human species.
- 12,000
- The Agricultural Revolution. Domestication of plants and animals. Permanent settlements.
- 5,000
- First kingdoms, script and money. Polytheistic religions.
- 4,250
- First empire – the Akkadian Empire of Sargon.
- 2,500
- Invention of coinage – a universal money.
- The Persian Empire – a universal political order ‘for the benefit of all humans’.
- Buddhism in India – a universal truth ‘to liberate all beings from suffering’.
- 2,000
- Han Empire in China. Roman Empire in the Mediterranean. Christianity.
- 1,400
- Islam.
- 500
- The Scientific Revolution. Humankind admits its ignorance and begins to acquire unprecedented power. Europeans begin to conquer America and the oceans. The entire planet becomes a single historical arena. The rise of capitalism.
- 200
- The Industrial Revolution. Family and community are replaced by state and market. Massive extinction of plants and animals.
- The Present
- Humans transcend the boundaries of planet Earth. Nuclear weapons threaten the survival of humankind. Organisms are increasingly shaped by intelligent design rather than natural selection.
- The Future
- Intelligent design becomes the basic principle of life? Homo sapiens is replaced by superhumans?
Prehistorical timeline
- #min-q {{query: {and:prehistoric timeline}}}
Critique of Sapiens📒
- Whyvert: A few comments on Yuval Noah Harari's bestseller "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" (2014). It is short, vigorous, and engaging.
  - Its focus on Three Big Revolutions makes for a clear overview of history. Its a simplification, but that's OK. https://t.co/R9thBiGSqp - Twitter thread by Whyvert, link
  - But that Cognitive Revolution. Suddenly, 70,000 years ago, humans became “as intelligent, creative, and sensitive as we are”. Suddenly, people could have understood quantum physics. https://t.co/xitoUkqAlL
    - Not very likely. Many forager peoples have numbering systems consisting of "one, two, many". Paul Dirac is going to be able to lecture to them on quantum physics?
      - In any case, his 70,000 date is based on when he thinks modern humans began leaving Africa. There's now evidence modern humans were in Asia long before that. Human cognitive evolution is a lot more complicated than one Revolution that suddenly turned everyone from dumb to smart.
        Thanks to the big brain everyone suddenly acquired in the Cognitive Revolution, humankind escaped from the realm of biology into the realm of culture.
        Maybe it would be better to say that BOTH culture AND biology have been important, both before and after this event? https://t.co/1is6A5Q3EA
        Harari's understanding of culture is questionable. He thinks of it as fictions or myths (not eg as norms).
        Why do people cooperate? Harari thinks it is because of fictions/myths https://t.co/uivLf0opuE
        According to Harari, fictions and myths are what allow humans to rule the earth.
        He seems to discount such parts of culture as knowledge or norms/rules/laws.
        Everything is fictional. https://t.co/1r133U9FVe
        Next comes the Agricultural Revolution. Harari echoes Jared Diamond, who has called it mankind's biggest mistake, by claiming it was history's biggest fraud.
        (I will say he does not idealize hunter-gatherers.) https://t.co/6PXH6cYOYV
        To say that "plants domesticated Homo sapiens" is a funny comment on how their genes have spread, but it is not an explanation of the origins of farming
        Was agriculture such a big fraud or mistake?
        This thread has already gotten longer than I intended, so I will pause and return tomorrow.
        The main gain from farming was permanent settlement (some lucky foragers along salmon rivers already had it). With settlement you can build a religious site, develop craft manufacturing, build a defensive palisade. So it is not all fraud or error.
        Harari claims that scholars used to think of cultures as completely unchanging (strawman alert!). He asserts they are constantly in flux (is this a new orthodoxy?).
        Wouldn't it be more reasonable to say that there is both continuity and change? https://t.co/Eart9QotZl
        Harari has a lengthy section arguing that the trend of history is towards ever-greater unity, and he cites things like inter-connection, globalization, mixing of cuisines.
        Here again he is one-sided and exaggerated. There are also many kinds of division and disconnection. https://t.co/3k0YAd6pt3
        In Sapiens, Harari does not give a role to geniuses or mega-agents, individuals who had a large impact on history.
        Constantine, without whom there would probably have been no spread of Christianity, is unmentioned. So is Ashoka, who ensured the spread of Buddhism.
        Correction: Constantine is mentioned briefly. But the general importance of major agents is not at all a theme of the book.
        Next: Harari's third big leap, the Scientific Revolution.
        Apparently Europe is a mere peninsula of "Afro-Asia" (🙄 no, "Afro-Asia" is not a thing) and had "played no important role in history" (🙄 fashionable denigration of Europe) https://t.co/1ra7d1e4HT
        "No important role" 🧐
        secular legal systems;
        exploring the world;
        massive printing/publishing; -
        individual rights, rule of law, and political representation;
        artistic experimentation; ...
        He may be right to regard the Scientific Revolution, not the Industrial Revolution, as the key event.
        David Wootton found a link from Denis Papin (scientist) to Thomas Newcomen (steam engine inventor), via Papin's obscure book on pressure.
        Wootton: https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2019/11/10/steam-engine-time-4/ https://t.co/S7mV3UAzSq
        The book is David Wootton, The Invention of Science.
        It has some good info, but I cannot recommend: it is very long (800 pages), repetitive, and digressive. Also, zero comparative content on why science arose in Europe as opposed to elsewhere.
        In the book's final sentences, Harari starts finger-wagging, chiding us for:
        -being discontented, irresponsible, and unsatisfied 😯;
        -not knowing our goals or direction or "what we want" (= "you ignorant people don't want what you should want" 🥴) https://t.co/064gLukAMI
        End of thread! If there's a better short, popular guide to history, I'm not aware of it. Eventually I hope @razibkhan will write one 😄
        Will Flyte: This is quite good:
        https://www.scribd.com/document/369491250/The-100-A-Ranking-of-the-Most-Michael-H-Hart-47005-pdf
        Will Flyte: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History: https://t.co/I6Z9rxkkXT
        We can quibble about who is on the list, but it is a reminder that major individuals (great men) have tended to be downplayed recently
        Will Flyte: History is the story of
        evolution in different environments
        inventors (broadly defined…), and
        invaders
        and nothing else comes close.
        Siberian Fox: sorry, what do the colors mean?
        Bao Jiankang: occupation, scientist, religious figure, military leader...
        Siberian Fox: strange pizarro and cortes have their own color then
        Hypertorus: Mix between red and white, maybe? Explorers and conquerors?
        Siberian Fox: having downloaded it on libgen and read a bit, the innacuracies of questionable descriptions of characters I know well make go full gell-mann amnesia on the ones I didn't, even if it has made me learn about a few non-western influencers.
        Siberian Fox: as long as it's taken as amusement-educational I guess it's ok, but it strikes me as making much less on an effort to be a serious ranking than even say, Murray's Human Accomplishment
        Will Flyte: It's 3 pages per person on 100 people in radically different fields. Not exactly meant to be an authoritative biography.
        Any in particular you disagree with?
        Siberian Fox: Freud in particular is bad, both its position on the ranking and the entire entry inaccurate re: psychological science and in general I don't see artists as being in the same level as conquerors or philosophers (reason Murray had separate list). Newton is right to be top 5,but...
        Siberian Fox: both Galileo and Copernicus so high seems excessive to me. Communist characters have innacuracies that you don't even need to be anti-communist (100 million number particularly egregious),Mendel feels too high etc. Will have to keep reading how he justifies Isabella of Castille
        Siberian Fox: Jefferson, Kennedy, Bolívar etc.
        One example where I worry is his take on Shakespeare. I could read it and see if the case for the alternate identity is persuasive, but given how far off he's on Freud, it makes me cautious about having this book as single source
        Siberian Fox: (again I'm fine with it for entertainment-educational purposes, but a few seem out of place in top 100 and in general I feel it's less serious than other attemps, if of course a massive amount of work)
        Siberian Fox: sorry not to mention: Moses is also egregious, and I think by 2000 biblical inaccuracy should be known
        Will Flyte: This is also a winner for sheer information density:
        https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/lessons-of-history
        HT: @JamesClear
        Will Flyte: "The first biological lesson of history is that life is competition.
        Cooperation is real…, but mostly because it is a form of competition.
        We cooperate within our group, family, community, and nation in order to make our group more powerful…
        Will Flyte: "The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection.
        From nature’s standpoint, we are all born unfree and unequal."
        Will Flyte: "Only the man below the average desires equality.
        Those who are conscious of being above average desire freedom. In the end, superior ability has its way…
        Will Flyte: "History is the story of humankind in a struggle with other species and themselves for the limited resources and gifts of the environment.
        Competition is the basic law."
        Will Flyte: "The basic reality is competition.
        If you are not competing in life, what would you develop? A certain degree of competition is necessary not only for progress, but also for survival."
        Will Flyte: "Society is not founded on the ideals of humankind, but on the nature of humankind.
        We are a product of the forces and instincts that drive us.…
        Will Flyte: "It is very dangerous for an individual to think that — even with 30 or 40 years of studying — he can judge and overcome the collective wisdom of the human race.
        Old ideas are very powerful.
        Will Flyte: "if religion is the shared belief that unifies a civilization and that belief system dies, then what will hold the civilization together?…"
        Will Flyte: "The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character.
        The only real emancipation is individual.
        The only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints."
        Will Flyte: "No matter who is in power, the gains gradually accrue to the most clever and talented. Then, eventually, there is some fracturing of the order, a new minority rises to power, and the pattern repeats itself.…
        Will Flyte: "Persons under 30 should never trust the economic, political, and moral ideas of other persons under 30."
        Idiotsansavant: Interesting chart. I had to look up ts’ai lun.
        Leandro Cardoso: That would be my dream!
        PSCV: Recommend this critical review of Harari by CR Hallpike https://www.newenglishreview.org/C_R_Hallpike/A_Response_to_Yuval_Harari's_'Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind'/
        yes, I agree with most of his criticisms, and I've added a few extra
        PSCV: Also recommend Hallpike's other writings as well including critiques of Chomsky and Rene Girard.
        https://www.amazon.com/Ship-Fools-Anthology-Nonsense-Primitive-ebook/dp/B07HX4188K
        Thanks for the rec. Reading it now.
        PSCV: Good thread.
        🌸🌸v🌸🌸: I genuinely think that Energy and Civilization is probably the great guide to history from recent books.
        Dominique Irigaray: Taking René Girard seriously as he deserves it: https://mimeticmargins.com/2019/11/05/the-point-yuval-harari-misses-of-myth-bringing-rene-girard-to-the-table/ by @BuysErik
        President-Elect Antipodean Reactionary: This book irritated the shit out of me. Mainly because due to its popularity, I had some expectations of it. "Everything is a fiction! Most of them are arbitrary, except these ones that we don't like!". Finished with a transhumanist "I live from the neck up" prophecy. Junk
        Fadi Akil: Wow. That book is more ideological in its spirit than what I thought. Thanks for the review!
        Seth Abrutyn: Gaukroger has a great book that is comparative. I have two other references that are slimmer volumes. Mostly focused on the Arab scientific revolution and why it stalled and how, through Iberia, fueled the European scientific rev
        Seth Abrutyn: Finally had a chance to look. Peter Dear (2001), david Lindberg (2007), and especially toby huff (2003)
        Yes Huff is good. It's what I had in mind. I think I may have been too harsh in my remarks on Wootton. It has a lot of value.
        halvorz ¯_(ツ)_/¯: man i need to finish that damn book
        It is too long, too disorganized IMO
        halvorz ¯_(ツ)_/¯: ooh yes I like that excuse
        but the half I read was so freakin interesting
        yeah, that's the problem
        17thCenturyShytePost: Neal Stephenson vindicated once again
        Lucre Snooker: Afro-Asia when the Western Europeans conquered the holy land for a while and also retook Iberia be like https://t.co/oBNraky6EG
        Yohanan Domnius: Hm, I vaguely remember something about some, how were they called, ah yes Romans. And there were those Gr, Gr, ah yes Greeks. And an empire or two, or a few more. And there was something about lingua franca or two, for long parts of history... And that's just for start.
        A Dangerous Chinese Bat 🌐: Up until 1500 he said.
        Steve Sailer: Presumably Harari is defining Greece and Rome out of western Europe, but I can recall this important role played by Western Europeans before 1500 AD: the Fall of the Roman Empire.
        There's even a book about it!
        jimmyla: When he says that Europe played no important role in history till 1500's, you realize he's completely ignorant of History and Civilization development.
        Lazy Glossophiliac: The triumph of monotheism was inevitable. Would have happened without Constantine. It might have happened through Christianity or something else. There was a boom of eastern religions and a decline of Greco-Roman cults.
        Lazy Glossophiliac: Monotheism won because it was intolerant. Some forms still are. If you believe there’s only one God in the Universe, you have to conclude that everyone who promotes other Gods is a liar.
        Lazy Glossophiliac: There were no religious wars before monotheism. Lots after. It was like aggressive, Africanized bees conquering territory from normal, domesticated ones.
        Lazy Glossophiliac: From these quotes, my impression of this book is negative.
        I'm mainly focusing on the doubtful parts, there's more to the book than fits in a few tweets
        jimmyla: the wannabe psychohistorians have trouble dealing with a Mule-like figure.
        Mats Vinnaren: By the same token, he is absolutely incorrect. Reality is opposite to his verdict.
        https://vdare.com/articles/the-genius-famine-the-death-of-religion-will-lead-to-the-death-of-genius-and-the-death-of-civilization
        𝓒𝓱𝓻𝓲𝓼𝓽𝓲𝓪𝓷 𝓖: He’s from Israel. The usual spin.
        I find Israelis refreshingly blunt and no-nonsense usually
        Tony Morley II: Caloric surplus is the prerequisite of settlement - without a surplus of foodstuffs, specialisation is precluded. Without specialisation, advanced trade, technology and craft manufacturing is precluded. Primitive #agriculture kicked off civilization. 🌾🍞🐐🥛🐂🥩 #HumanProgress
        Sage Gibbons: Nodding my head with all of this but must note how much this tweet sounds like an RPG skill tree progression
        ice9: Doubtful. If only because the resulting population explosions eventually, after many years, led to improvements in technologies used for the benefit of said populations at large.
        Shift Lant: Wouldn't it also imply a genetic change?
        Reid Albecker: "Plants domesticated Homo sapiens" is a comment meaning agriculture changed the cultures of of the people who adopted it.
        Lazy Glossophiliac: This seems like a terrible book. The agicultural revolution made civilization possible.
        Jan Minar ❤️: Civilization is like Democracy -- we all know it's a really good thing, because it pays for its own PR.
        Jan Minar ❤️: Settled agriculture allowed the hunter-gatherer elite to farm their less genetically endowed relatives like cattle (along with animal cattle & plants). The elite always had existed -- those who survived the astronomical death rates of the hunter-gatherer society.
        Jan Minar ❤️: To make the argument that humankind suffered by the ag revolution, you would have to show that the number of people who are free and elite and what have you was decreased by it. Which is obviously not so.
        Mats Vinnaren: Neither of these dudes are rigid scientific intellectuals. As wonderfully written & pieced together their hyped magnum opuses are, they are too inaccurate, incorrect, & deficient descriptions of reality; of historical & societal phenomena w/ strong biological causes.
        Cameron Harwick 🏛: This was actually the reason I liked the book so much more than everyone else seems to. Myth and norms aren't separate explanations; in fact I'd say myth is an essential component of most norms. I thought Harari's discussion of this point was excellent for a pop sci book.
        He uses the example of Peugeot and its lion symbol as a fiction. But how is that organization based on a myth?
        Cameron Harwick 🏛: Miller (1992) models "company culture" as a myth-like sort of thing that overcomes shirking problems within firms. Anthropologically, it's not insignificant that meaning-laden symbols (like the Peugeot lion) coordinate altruistic behavior in humans. https://t.co/yIcW8TudvL
        Cameron Harwick 🏛: Reading back over that section in Harari, I'll grant the connection is sketchy there. The legal fiction point seems like an overly specific instance of how humans use symbols to elicit buy-in against what would otherwise be our individual best interests.
        Reid Albecker: Not a departure from the gist of the "social imaginary" construct, which is consistent with Harari's writing and does not discount norms/rules/laws. Increases in a culture's knowledge can be facilitated as a result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_(sociology);
        🌸🌸v🌸🌸: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_anthropology
        It's like generative anthropology, but for simple people.
        🌸🌸v🌸🌸: ie more concrete:
        There was the Original Event that created modern language (hence fiction).
        SHUTUP!: What about spoken language? Is that not the strongest social glue of them all? NEXT‼️
        Yes it is. But everyone has speech, whereas cooperativeness varies among individuals and groups
        SHUTUP!: I’m not sure what you’re saying. But I’m saying speech was the primary social behavior that allowed humans to cooperate and ultimately dominate earth. Not mythology, fiction, or even knowledge. Those are all secondary. Idk why the author focuses on myth
        Soulsweller: No, he is pretty spot on about this. You're interpreting him too literally: he uses fiction as a synonim for what has traditionally been referred to as symbolic thought.
        Seth Abrutyn: Nonsense.
        Jan Minar ❤️: Shared mythology allows people to synchronize their norms, without litigating what those norms ought to be every time something needs to be done.
        No other social technology can do this, so our ability to have myths must have been the start of history as we know it, QED.
        Jan Minar ❤️: Myths not in the sense of entertainment-level narratives, but in the sense of narratives people believe so deeply they are not even necessarily consciously aware of it.
        How do we know they exist then?
        I don't deny that myths exist and that they can prompt people to act together; what I do deny is that they always do so and are the basis of all collaboration
        Jan Minar ❤️: What other social tech can supplant them?
        You have these massive nations several orders of magnitude above the Dunbar number, that instantly can co-operate across time and space.
        I think variation in innate cooperativeness is more important than "social tech"
        Japanese are more cooperative than Somalis, but not because they have myths.
        Jan Minar ❤️: They are brought to stark relief whenever we live alongside people of a different mythology for a while, and reflect upon it. That's why people in their 20s should travel.
        Maybe norms synchronize for a simpler reason: people tend to copy each other?
        Jan Minar ❤️: For that you need empathy, i.e. theory of personality, i.e. you need to understand what the other person deeply believes. Shared meaningful experiences (the other part of religion: rituals) help syncing this, but myth is crucial in syncing the interpretation as well.
        Jan Minar ❤️: As a counter-point, go pick someone you know who has converted to a new religion -- you won't be able to understand anything about his new interpretation of the world at all.
        Myth is that technology via which we copy the norms.
        Seth Abrutyn: Agreed on that last point. I remain skeptical of the agricultural revolution being 12000 years ago, when the plow hadn't been invented yet and really it was the end of the ice age and the slow onset of sedentary life. I would also argue the plow+writing (c. 5000 BP)...
        Seth Abrutyn: were far more important than whatever he thinks happened 12000 yrs ago.
        I'd like to see you expand on that idea sometime
        Seth Abrutyn: I will take you up on that. Maybe I'll write a quick blog post about it later this week or early next.
        Lazy Glossophiliac: I think the earliest surviving statues and figures are from about 45k years ago. That seems like a more important point than 70k years ago.
        Atlanto Celtica: Just because there were modern humans living in Asia over 70kya doesn't mean they have any descendants living today.
        I hope find out soon. The way it goes is that they probably passed on some ancestry
      - Leandro Cardoso: We are quite dumber as we usually think we are. We have culture and inter-generations passed info, but we alone, individually, are not able to solve simple problems like "reinvent" Euclidean Geometry if one is born wild in the jungle.
        Leandro Cardoso: I can handle some math tools like ODEs and some algebra, but I am quite sure I can not figure out alone how to catch a hare and make it a meal. If my "tribe" had teached me how to survive in the jungle, probably I would be unable to handle simple polynomial derivatives by myself
      - Tim Rooney: Potential reframe- brains were developed enough so you could take an infant and successfully raise it in our society
        Not that you could walk up to someone and teach them quantum physics
        Which you can't really do, even today
      - luke.richert: Isn’t that just an incidental result of culture, location and necessity though? In the abstract all anatomically modern humans have an equal shot at getting Dirac (even if the capability didn’t arrive in a magic burst 70 ka)
        I disagree. Distribution of genius is not at all equal among populations
    - Siberian Fox: some of the points you mention are mentioned here, which is pretty good except for an absolutely retarded point about darwinism toward the end https://www.newenglishreview.org/C_R_Hallpike/A_Response_to_Yuval_Harari%27s_%27Sapiens%3A_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind%27/
  - Pumpkin Person: does he think any of these revolutions were caused by genetic changes?
    - The first one presumably
  - fall duder: the book that earned harari a ferrari
  - TakingHayekSeriously🧨: The book was so elementary -- when not stupid -- I had to put it down. For those who don't know much, only.
    - It s useful to look at because it encapsulates much conventional wisdom
    - TakingHayekSeriously🧨: I'll give it another try ...
    - Haha, I don't want you to suffer needlessly!
  - Mats Vinnaren: I haven't read it yet but unfortunately it seems it's like Guns, Germs, & Steel in how it's well written, captivating journey but leaves out all the most valid, powerful explanations for outcomes, forwarding a hypothesis not holding up under rigid scrutiny.
  - 𝗦𝗜𝗠O𝗡 O'𝗥𝗘𝗚𝗔𝗡 🦊: save thread
  - the L 💀🔗✒: guess what https://t.co/klBzr8PWva
    - wow! a graphic version
    - the L 💀🔗✒: he's even the readers' personal guide/narrator throughout the whole thing
- @harari_yuval should read the following papers:
  - https://sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/how-early-christian-church-gave-birth-today-s-weird-europeans… (Catholic church banning cousin marriages -> unique success of NW Europe)
    https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf… (Ashkenazi Jewish IQ & genetic origins -> extraordinary success in intellectual domains especially at top)
- https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/an-historians-evolving-vision-of-mankind/
- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/sapiens-brief-history-humankind-yuval-noah-harari-review
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-by-yuval-noah-harari-1423261230
- https://www.newenglishreview.org/C_R_Hallpike/A_Response_to_Yuval_Harari's_'Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind'/
- https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2019/02/21/an-open-letter-to-an-author/
- https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/a-reductionist-history-of-humankind
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIp09Vwja6c&feature=youtu.be&t=1055
- https://mimeticmargins.com/2019/11/05/the-point-yuval-harari-misses-of-myth-bringing-rene-girard-to-the-table/
- https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/unacknowledged-fictions-of-yuval-harari/
- Others to read:
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Rutherford
  - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Transcendence-Humans-Evolved-through-Language/dp/0241281113
  - For people who want a concise (and original) statement of the "agriculture was bad" theory read Jared Diamond's short essay "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”. (And if you are aware of the degree to which current scholarship supports/refutes please let me know!)
Summaries
- https://neilkakkar.com/sapiens.html
TOC
Questions
- #min-q {{query: {and: q Sapiens📒 {not: query}}}}
SRS
Claims
- #min-q {{query: {and: Claim Sapiens📒}}}
Quotes
- #min-ish {{query: {and: > Sapiens📒}}}
1: The cognitive revolution
- pre-reading
  - the two other things I've read about this is John Vervaeke about the Upper Paleolithic transition, and [[The Elephant in the Brain📒]]. First talks about a big change brought on by a more complex world, about shamans, and then a lot about psycho-technology. The second about how we evolved in social groupings to lie and manipulate. #m
  - Questions: #q
    - What are his main points?
    - Is it mostly a historical summary of how we developed, or is he making some bold claims?
    - Do his insights come mostly in the form of neurobiology, evolutionary biology, social psychology, etc?
    - To what extent does what he says give us new insights about how we are today and where we're going?
    - What did we not know 50-100 years ago? What are the big unknowns that might change this story in another 50 years? How does the way it was written reflect the current 'Zeitgeist'.
      - internalized Darwinism, post-modernism (? Kristin says: the way he presents religion, human construction)
- Timeline of human pre-history Wikipedia
- 1: An animal of no significance
  - revolutions
    - 70,000 cognitive revolution
      - Toba catastrophe
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
    - 12,000 agricultural revolution
    - 500 scientific revolution
  - Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One become the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother. (l 120) #Claim
    - Why does that have to be the case? What happened to all the other apes? Why is that one daughter the ancestor of all chimpanzees? Is that how it works with speciation #q #evolution
  - From 2 million BC to 10,000 BC, the world was home to multiple human species - it was not a linear model of evolution. 100,000 years ago, there were at least six species of humans alive. #prehistoric timeline
  - Physical evolution
    - large brains (why did evolution favour this over 2 million years, given the cost)
      - needs a lot of energy, resulting in less muscles/speed
    - walking upright - seeing farther, freeing hands for other things
      - nerves and muscles making hands very flexible/intricate
      - skeletal pains
      - narrow birth canal, many women dead in childbirth
        giving birth earlier is advantageous, humans born prematurely
        needs a society to support, but also enables more socialization and education
  - We were until recently middle of the food chain - using tools to extract bone marrow after all the other animals were done. Our jump to the top of the food chain happened suddenly (last 100,000 years)
    - other animals on the top of the pyramid, slowly, ecosystem had time to adapt (checks and balances)
    - humans themselves failed to adjust - other top predators are "majestic creatures" we are "banana republic dictators"
      - Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump. (l. 229) #Claim
        this seems a bit fanciful - but I guess we will look at his evidence and argumentation #m
  - Fire
    - started 800,000 years ago, 300,000 using daily #prehistoric timeline
    - dependable source of light and warmth
    - deadly weapon
    - torching neighbourhoods -> grasslands that are easier to hunt
    - enable us to eat things we could not digest otherwise
      - also kills germs/disinfects food
      - speeds up eating - don't need to chew for five hours
      - shortening intestine tract - more energy for large brain?
  - 150,000 ago sapiens looking physiologically identical to us #prehistoric timeline
  - 75,000 ago spread to Arabia #prehistoric timeline
    - interbreeding theory
      - thus different "races" would be the result of homo sapiens interbreeding with different other human species in different geographic regions?
      - study in 2010, 1-4% of unique human DNA is Neanderthal
      - 6% of unique human DNA of modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan
    - replacement theory
      - out-hunting/gathering
      - violence and genocide
  - last remains #prehistoric timeline
    - homo soloensis 50,000
    - homo denisova same
    - neanderthals 30,000
    - flores 12,000
- 2: The three of knowledge
  - 100,000 years ago, sapiens went to Levant, but failed and retreated. #prehistoric timeline
    - Less smart than current humans, internal wiring?
  - 70,000 years ago, Upper Paleolithic transition - he calls it cognitive revolution #prehistoric timeline
    - left Africa for the second time
    - quickly reached Europe and East Asia
    - 45,000 years ago - Australia over the open sea (first humans) #prehistoric timeline
    - inventions
      - boats
      - oil lamps
      - bows
      - arrows
      - needles
    - social
      - art
      - religion
      - commerce
      - social stratification
    - why?
      - accidental genetic mutations changing inner wiring of brains of Sapiens? (most commonly believed)
        "Tree of Knowledge mutation"
      - John Vervaeke seems to argue that it's rather the development of psycho-technology, rather than a biological development #m
      - enabled flexible language - information sharing, gossiping, primarily a social animal
        re [[The Elephant in the Brain📒]]
        enabled cooperation in larger groups, tigher and more sophisticated types of cooperation
        [[Awakening From the Meaning Crisis]] does talk about more complex forms of interaction, but its unclear what is cause and what is effect
        Upper Paleolithic transition
  - Our species go back about 200,000 years. But there's a continuum because about 40,000 years ago, we see new things.
    - art
    - music
    - symbolic calendars
      - keeping track of the moon (easier to hunt)
    - projectile weapons (throwing spears and slings)
      - throwing is reflected in a lot of the words that we use
        subject
        object
        project.
      - very complex activity, which you can see from trying to teach artificial intelligence to throw
  - humanity developed because of threat/pressure
    - Around {70,000} years ago, humanity was threatened by extinction, only about 10,000 left
      - last Ice Age
      - supervolcano (Toba catastrophe)
  - survived because of socio-cultural and socio-cognitive development (link to Shamans?)
    - they developed larger trading networks
      - allowed them to be more resilient to the different climate.
      - distributed cognition
        networking brains together to solve hard problems.
    - they developed a set of rituals that allowed them to deal with these broader social networks.
      - Interacting with strangers
        New situation
        Currently we live in cities, constantly interact with strangers
        But very strange to be around strangers that are not part of your kinship group, that you didn't know.
        We had to develop rituals
        to be able to trust each other
        to be able to understand each other
        like handshaking
        to take someone's hand,
        you see that they have no weapons,
        you get some feeling, whether they're sick, whether they're stressed,
        Understand others
        you need to be able to put yourself in their position,
        need to be able to imagine what they're thinking
        mindsight pick up on their emotions.
        And as we do that, we gain a better ability to get insight into our own thinking and mental processes and this is the beginning of mindfulness.
      - Maintaining our own group affiliation
        As we develop rituals to be better able to deal with strangers, we have another problem, the trust from our own group
        before that wasn't much in doubt, because you were always with them.
        But now, there is temptation.
        A pervasive theme of myth: being lured away by the stranger.
        We develop rituals to prove our loyalty, initiation rituals that involve pain or danger.
        Requires a decentering because we are not in the center, but our group is
        Also requires much stronger control of our emotions, and how we express them
  - only humans can chat about things that do not exist (because of enabled flexible language - information sharing, gossiping, primarily a social animal)
    - legends, myths, gods, religions
    - "Fiction has enables us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively" (l. 415)
    - Sociological research has shown that the maximum "natural" size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Dunbar's number #Claim
      - very rarely have sociologists observed groups larger than a hundred (chimpanzees), usually 20-50
      - "even if a fertile valley could feed 500 archaic Sapiens, there was no way so many strangers could live together"
      - what is "natural" size?
      - what does "bonded by gossip"? What are other ways of bonding?
      - What empirical evidence? Counter-evidence?
      - Wikipedia:
        This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size.[3] By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.
        Primatologists have noted that, due to their highly social nature, primates must maintain personal contact with the other members of their social group, usually through social grooming. Such social groups function as protective cliques within the physical groups in which the primates live. The number of social group members a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex. This suggests that there is a species-specific index of the social group size, computable from the species' mean neocortical volume.[citation needed]
        In 1992,[1] Dunbar used the correlation observed for non-human primates to predict a social group size for humans. Using a regression equation on data for 38 primate genera, Dunbar predicted a human "mean group size" of 148 (casually rounded to 150), a result he considered exploratory due to the large error measure (a 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230).[1]
        Dunbar then compared this prediction with observable group sizes for humans. Beginning with the assumption that the current mean size of the human neocortex had developed about 250,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene, Dunbar searched the anthropological and ethnographical literature for census-like group size information for various hunter–gatherer societies, the closest existing approximations to how anthropology reconstructs the Pleistocene societies. Dunbar noted that the groups fell into three categories—small, medium and large, equivalent to bands, cultural lineage groups and tribes—with respective size ranges of 30–50, 100–200 and 500–2500 members each.[citation needed]
        Dunbar's surveys of village and tribe sizes also appeared to approximate this predicted value, including 150 as the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village; 150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline's sub-specialisation; 150 as the basic unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity and in modern times since the 16th century; and notions of appropriate company size.[citation needed]
        Dunbar has argued that 150 would be the mean group size only for communities with a very high incentive to remain together. For a group of this size to remain cohesive, Dunbar speculated that as much as 42% of the group's time would have to be devoted to social grooming. Correspondingly, only groups under intense survival pressure,[citation needed] such as subsistence villages, nomadic tribes, and historical military groupings, have, on average, achieved the 150-member mark. Moreover, Dunbar noted that such groups are almost always physically close: "[...] we might expect the upper limit on group size to depend on the degree of social dispersal. In dispersed societies, individuals will meet less often and will thus be less familiar with each other, so group sizes should be smaller in consequence." Thus, the 150-member group would occur only because of absolute necessity—due to intense environmental and economic pressures.
        Dunbar, in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, proposes furthermore that language may have arisen as a "cheap" means of social grooming, allowing early humans to maintain social cohesion efficiently. Without language, Dunbar speculates, humans would have to expend nearly half their time on social grooming, which would have made productive, cooperative effort nearly impossible. Language may have allowed societies to remain cohesive, while reducing the need for physical and social intimacy.[9][10] This result is confirmed by the mathematical formulation of the social brain hypothesis, that showed that it is unlikely that increased brain size would have led to large groups without the kind of complex communication that only language allows.[11]
    - Fiction as the way to overcome the Dunbar's number - Any large-scale human cooperation is rooted in common myths that exist only in peoples collective imagination. (l. 459)
      - #q is this related to social constructivism "everything is constructed"?
      - Legend of Peugeot #theory of the firm
        Does the company exist? It's a "legal fiction".
        comparing it to sorcery, myths etc
      - we can rapidly change the ways in which we collaborate through changing the myths - French revolution
        basically letting us "evolve" much faster than genetic evolution
        #m
        psycho-technology?
        Marxist dialectics, superstructure and material conditions?
        nature/nurture? but to what extent does this apply to all individuals in a certain civilization, or to a smaller collective (nation state?), or even to classes within that nation state (I grew up in a White middle-class area with hippie parents etc...)?
        he is making an argument about learning - through language and written text, however he is framing it as "shared myths"... is this the same or different? yes everything (including language, letters, concepts) are "social constructs" and thus "myths"? But is this a useful way of framing them?
        childless elites - Buddhist, Chinese, priesthood - something that goes "against evolution"
        trade
        #Claim : all Sapiens trade networks are based on fictions
        trust in fictional entities like dollars, totemic trademarks of corporations
        when two strangers in a tribal society want to trade, they will often establish trust by appealing to a common god, mythical ancestor or totem animal (l. 591)
    - "The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call 'cultures'. Once cultures appeared, they never ceased to change and develop, and these unstoppable alterations are what we call 'history'.
      - this is when history and biology separates. It's a mistake to compare an individual human with an individual chimpanzee... comparing 10-100-1000 the differences are much larger
      - relationship to games - "The whole of history takes place within the bounds of this biological arena. However this arena is extraordinarily large, allowing Sapiens to play an astounding variety of games. Thanks to their ability to invent fiction, Sapiens create more and more complex games, which each generation develops and elaborates further".
- 3: A day in the life of Adam and Eve
  - lives as hunter-gatherers until last 12,000 years - shaped our habits, conflicts and sexuality?
    - obesity - gorging gene
    - collective fatherhood? ancient commune hypothesis - nuclear family is difficult, divorce
      - others argue nuclear family was traditional - and is found in almost all current societies
  - difficult to learn about them -
    - they had very few artefacts, only stone/metal has survived
    - current hunter/gatherers are influenced by society around them, and are usually in geographical areas with difficult climatic conditions/terrain
    - they differ a lot from each other
      - in Australia, 300-700,000 aboriginal hunter-gatherers, in 200-600 tribes, with on language, religion, norms, customs
      - #Claim : Ever since the cognitive revolution, there hasn't been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.
        strong argument for social constructivism - everything is socially constructed? gender, family, work... Communist utopia is possible? Everyone could be happy under fascism? #m
      - but some generalities
        several dozen to several hundred individuals
        only domesticated animal before agricultural revolution: dog (15,000 years ago)
        hunting/fighting, alarm system
        while some interactions between tribes, mostly completely isolated and independent #Claim
        trading restricted to prestige items (shells), not staples like fruit and meat
        no evidence that tribe depended on import/export for survival
        average human encountered no more than a few hundred humans during life
        mostly migratory
        exceptionally with very rich food sources, bands settled down in seasonal or permanent camps
        drying, smoking, freezing food
        permanent fishing villages were the first permanent settlements in history, far before agricultural revolution
        on coast of Indonesian islands 45,000 years ago
        mostly gathering, less hunting (in terms of calories)
        required a detailed map of the territory, seasons etc, which foods were nourishing/made you sick
        very fit, attuned to environment, in control of own body
        "better life than modern man"
        healthier, shorter work hours, more interesting
        high child mortality, but if you survived, could make it to 60 even 80
      - We know extremely little about them - 'shroud of silence' - but they shaped landscapes... Visiting remote Sibir we think it's pristine, but foragers brought dramatic changes even to densest jungles and desolate wilderness.
- 4: The flood
  - Journey of first humans to Australia (45,000 years ago) is one of the most important events in history #prehistoric timeline
    - shows advanced seafaring and navigation skills
    - first time humans managed to leave Afro-Asian ecological system
    - first time humans became top of food chain and transformed beyond recognition
    - lots of big animals - with a few thousand years, they all vanished. Food chains completely reorganized
    - same happened in New Zealand with megafauna
  - Reaches Western hemisphere (America) 16,000 years ago #prehistoric timeline
    - walked from Siberia to Alaska
    - 14,000 years ago ice melted (glaciers), allowed easier access
    - by 10,000 BC humans already inhabited the southern point of America, Tierra del Fuego
    - within 2,000 years of arrival, most unique species were gone
2: The agricultural revolution
- Pre-reading questions #q
  - How did it begin?
  - Where did it begin (Indus valley, near Iran?)
  - How quickly did it spread (and how)
  - What did it change
    - social structures
    - psychology
    - nutrition and movement
  - Were there distinct periods of agriculture before industrialization?
    - How was ownership organized? feudalism is relatively recent?
  - How important was animal husbandry vs grains/vegetables etc?
  - How quickly did seeds spread to areas where they had not been grown before?
  - To what extent was their specialization and trade networks?
- Reading log:
  - 86 pages
  - started December 6th, 2020 06:19
    - ended around 9AM. Reading slowly, but enjoying the process, and feel like I'm building up a skeleton around pre-history that will make it more enjoyable to read other sources in the future. Did a bit of Twitter sharing of some practices - block-refs are so much better now. Twitter
  - second reading session December 14th, 2020 06:06-09:32, also went to the store.
- History's Biggest Fraud
  - agricultural revolution
    - history
      - began around 9500-9800 BC in south-eastern Turkey, western Iran and the Levant #prehistoric timeline
        The Levant
        The Levant is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Western Asia. In its narrowest sense, it is equivalent to the historical region of Syria****, which included present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and most of Turkey south-east of the middle Euphrates. In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all of the Eastern Mediterranean with its islands;[3] that is, it included all of the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean shores, extending from Greece to Cyrenaica in eastern Libya.[2][4]
        What did the historical region of Syria include?
        The Levant is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean region of Western Asia. In its narrowest sense, it is equivalent to the historical region of Syria****, which included present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine and most of Turkey south-east of the middle Euphrates. In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all of the Eastern Mediterranean with its islands;[3] that is, it included all of the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean shores, extending from Greece to Cyrenaica in eastern Libya.[2][4]
      - timeline (began slowly and in a small area) #prehistoric timeline
        wheat and goats domesticated by 9000BC
        peas and lentils 8000BC
        olive trees 5000BC
        horses 4000BC
        grapevines 3500BC
        main wave of domestication over by 3500BC (some animals and plants, like camels came later)
      - Today most calories come from wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, millet, barley.
        No noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2000 years.
      - Sprang up in other parts of the world entirely independently. Ref How quickly did it spread (and how). Focal points:
        Central America: corn and beans
        South America: potatoes and llamas
        China: rice, millet, pigs
        North America: pumpkins
        New Guinea: sugar cane, bananas
        West Africa: African millet, African rice, sorghum, wheat
      - By first century AD, vast majority of people throughout most of the world were agriculturists.
      - Only a very small number of plants and animals are domesticable, and this is where agricultural revolution happened. Geographical determinism ala Guns, Germs and Steel📒
    - boon or bane?
      - great leap forward for humanity - tale of progress fueled by human brain power?
        How do we judge progress? More intellectual/artistic progress for humanity as a whole? Population growth? Average life quality for those alive (and how do we measure that?) Life quality for the lowest x%? #q
        Perhaps link to rationalism and Effective Altruism? (is it better to have a person who is not too happy, or to not have that person at all?) #m
        What was the causal chain of events that led to the agricultural revolution? Was it technological determinism (once someone figured out how to domesticate certain species, it "had to happen"?). Could there have been other choices made? And once a change in production happened, did it inexorably lead to a specific societal structure? #q
      - no evidence of people becoming "more intelligent" - hunter gatherers very knowledgeable
        how do we separate intelligence from culture, and knowledge? #q
        An individual in a hunter-gatherer tribe would be much more capable than me in nature, but the amount of resources and knowledge I have access to far surpasses... And without being able to grow the population, the knowledge of the hunter-gatherer would never surpass their immediate surroundings. #m
      - Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. #Claim
        more food -> population explosion and pampered elites
      - "plants domesticated humans rather than vice versa" - domestication of humans
        I've seen this perspective before - that for example dogs or animals "domesticated humans" rather than the other way around. Related to memetics? #m
        “The horseman serves the horse,The neat-herd serves the neat,The merchant serves the purse,The eater serves his meat;‘Tis the day of the chattel,Web to weave, and corn to grind,Things are in the saddle,And ride mankind.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
        "Wheat did this by manipulating homo sapiens to its advantage." "Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields."
        Anthropomorphizing wheat. #m
        Is this just a "fun perspective" or is it saying something profound? What? It seems to impart volition or teleology to species and evolution (both humans and the cultivars). Was it "co-domestication"? #q
      - Effects of agricultural revolution on human body
        human spines, knees, necks and arches paid a price
        slipped discs, arthritis, and hernias.
        Earlier he talked about how we still suffer because we're walking upright with big brains, now we're also paying the price for agriculture? #m
        So how much of current ailments are due to #q
        a) walking upright (being human)
        b) agricultural revolution
        c) industrial revolution
        d) smart phones/computers
        grains are bad for teeth and gums
        poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest
      - Hunter-gatherers have much more diverse food sources, so more secure than peasants (related to antifragility?)
        in many communities, peasants relied on a single staple
      - Early farmers were at least as violent as forager ancestors, if not more so. #Claim
        farmers had more possessions, and needed land. Foragers could move on, farmers more attached to land, less compromise, fight to the bitter end
      - took thousands of year to develop more advanced political structures beyond tribes
        brought human violence under control
        before that, responsible for 15/30% of deaths
      - enabled population explosion
        same area: 100 hunter gatherers -> 1000 peasants (malnourished and diseased) in 8500BC
        "The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain but rather copies of DNA helixes"
        But here we're using evolution (through sexual selection) to talk about societal structures, does that make sense? #q
- The Luxury Trap
  - Rise of farming - Gradual affair spread over centuries and millennia. Ref How quickly did it spread (and how)
  - Going to respond to But here we're using evolution (through sexual selection) to talk about societal structures, does that make sense? #q
  - 50,000 years in the Middle East without agriculture.
    - Regulated fertility (good times/bad times)
      - hormonal and genetic mechanisms
        in good times, females reach puberty earlier, chances of getting pregnant are higher
      - cultural mechanisms
        nursing for several years to avoid getting pregnant again (small babies a burden on nomads)
        full or partial sexual abstinence
        abortions / infanticide
  - 16000BC last ice age -> period of global warming #prehistoric timeline
    - spreading wheat
      - increasing temperature -> increasing rainfall
      - wild wheat spread, people began eating more
        inadvertently spread it
        needed to winnow, grind and cook to be able to eat
        so carried it back to campsite for processing, some fell out on the way
      - burning down forests, helped wheat
    - harvest camp gradually expanded in time (four weeks to permanent village) (ref How did it begin?)
      - Natufian in Levant, 12500BC to 9500BC, hunter-gatherers in permanent villages - gathering and processing of wild cereals #prehistoric timeline
      - stone houses and granaries
      - might have brewed beer
        Researchers Hayden et al. (2013) compiled circumstantial evidence that the Natufians brewed beer and used it in the context of feasting. They argue that production of beverages from fermented barley, wheat, and/or rye may well have been an impetus for early agriculture, for assuring that a ready source of barley was available.
      - began laying aside part of harvest to sow next season
      - no clear delineation, but by 8500BC, Middle East peppered with permanent villages where inhabitants spent most of time cultivating a few domesticated species. #prehistoric timeline
  - results of being settled
    - from Regulated fertility (good times/bad times) to a child per year
      - infant mortality soared
        commonly 1/3 of children died before 20
        I've seen before that life expectancy in prehistoric times was actually not so different from today, apart from huge infant mortality #m
        feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system
        Weird that this issue around infant mortality which we are dealing with in the developing world today was present in early farming societies #m
      - needed extra hands
      - easier to care for more kids when sedentary
  - basically a "boiling the frog" argument for how we got "tricked", ref What was the causal chain of events that led to the agricultural revolution? Was it technological determinism (once someone figured out how to domesticate certain species, it "had to happen"?). Could there have been other choices made? And once a change in production happened, did it inexorably lead to a specific societal structure? #q
    - One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
      ref Ivan Illich on the automobile, email, etc.
- Divine Intervention
  - Maybe Sapiens had other aspirations, and were consciously willing to make their lives harder in order to achieve them. Ref How do we judge progress? More intellectual/artistic progress for humanity as a whole? Population growth? Average life quality for those alive (and how do we measure that?) Life quality for the lowest x%? #q
  - In the case of modern history, scholars cannot avoid taking into account non-material factors such as ideology and culture. Because of written archives - we know nothing about non-material influences on Natufian decisions
    - but Göbekli Tepe in Turkey - 9500BC, built by hunter-gatherers
      - no signs of settlement or houses, but monumental pillared structures with engraving, seven ton stones (five meter tall), half chiselled pillar weighing 50 tons
      - the only way to build was for thousands of foragers belonging to different bands and tribes to cooperate over an extended period of time
        only a sophisticated religious or ideological system could sustain such effort
      - einkorn wheat was initially domesticated right there
        in order to feed people who built and used the monumental structures, particularly large quantities of food were required
        #Claim (speculative) foragers switched from gathering wild wheat to intense wheat cultivation, not to increase normal food supply but to support building and running of a temple
        #q from Tor-Espen: is religion the appropriate word for it? Or culture?
- Victims of the Revolution
  - Domestication of animals
    - nomadic bands stalking wild sheep gradually altered the constitutions of herds on which they preyed
      - began with selective hunting (old/sick) - spared fertile females and young lambs
      - maybe actively defending herd against other predators
      - corralling herd into narrow gorge to better control/defend
      - culling most aggressive rams, resistant to control, first (and inquisitive - going far from the herd)
      - sheep becomes fatter, more submissive and less curious for each generation
    - or maybe hunters caught a lamb, fattening it during months of plenty and slaughtering in the lean season
    - Why did this take so long after the cognitive revolution? What determined when it happened - was it the continued cognitive development of human tribes, something about the biosphere? #q
    - supplied:
      - food
      - raw materials
      - muscle power
    - > This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.
- Building Pyramids
  - Qs
    - #min-ish {{query: {and: Building Pyramids q {not: query}}}}
  - population explosion
    - 10,000BC - around 5-8 million nomadic foragers
    - year 0: 250 million farmers
    - How do we know this, how certain? #q
      - 10,000BC - around 5-8 million nomadic foragers
      - year 0: 250 million farmers
  - psychological impact
    - radical contraction of "life world" #agent arena relationship
      - attachment to "my house", separation from neighbours
        accumulating objects
      - artificial man-made landscapes
        division between "wild" and home
        but only in small pockets
        year 1400, humans only took up 2% of earth's surface - elsewhere too hot/dry/wet/not suitable for cultivation. Today 50-70%.
    - expansion of E: Time scales
      - farmers thinking years and decades into the future, unlike hunter gatherers
        even if hunter gatherers built political alliances, made art
        farmers had anxiety - not just because they had more cause for worry but because they could do something about it
        their surplus built civilizations - went to rulers. Up until modern era, 90% of humanity were poor peasants.
        > History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
      - seasonal cycle
      - fundamental uncertainty - fragility by monocropping
        How diverse were food sources? Today we talk about modern agriculture being less diverse than traditional, but I guess traditional is still much less diverse than hunter gathering. #q
        had to produce more than they needed to build up reserves
    - Myths that sustain empires
      - > The problem at the root of such calamities is that humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals. The handful of millennia separating the agricultural revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.
      - > Even prisons and concentration camps are cooperation networks, and can function only because thousands of strangers somehow managed to coordinate their actions
      - Code of Hammurabi
        1176BC Babylon was the world's biggest city, (taking over from Thebes in Egypt)
        in Mesopotamia
        a historical region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent, in modern days roughly corresponding to most of Iraq, Kuwait, the eastern parts of Syria, Southeastern Turkey, and regions along the Turkish–Syrian and Iran–Iraq borders.[1]
        on the banks of the Euphrates river in Iraq
        Babylonian empire world's largest
        This was around the time of the Late Bronze Age Collapse
        between 1200-1150BC
        a transition period in the Near East, Anatolia, the Aegean region, North Africa, the Caucasus, the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, a transition which historians believe was violent, sudden, and culturally disruptive. The palace economy of the Aegean region and Anatolia that characterized the Late Bronze Age disintegrated, transforming into the small isolated village cultures of the Greek Dark Ages.
        Axial age - Karen Armstrong
        Code is one of oldest longer texts preserved, uniform legal system
        Already classes (superior, commoner, slave), #slavery
      - Main factors preventing people from realising that the order organising their lives exist only in their imagination
        it is embedded in our material world
        architecture, interior design (individual rooms)
        desires are shaped from birth by society's dominant muths
        "follow your heart" - 20th century Romanticism and Coca-Cola
        travel - consumerism telling us we must sample a wide variety of experiences, relationships, travel
        imagined order is inter-subjective
        we have to get along, everyone around us believe it.
        Related to big questions around Marxist dialectics, how society can change - does he have a theory of how imagined orders arise or can be changed #q
        > Change of such magnitude can only be accomplished with the help of a complex organization, such as a political party, an ideological movement, or a religious cult. However, in order to establish such complex organizations, it's necessary to convince many strangers to cooperate with one another. And this will only happen if these strangers believe in some shared myths. It follows that in order to change an existing imagine order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.
- Memory overload
  - 1. Information-needs of an empire #legibility, #Thinking like a state📒
    - Large societies found in other species, such as ants and bees are stable and resilient because most of the information needed to sustain them is encoded in the genome
    - Sumerians in Mesopotamia, between 3500-3000BC basic writing
      - signs for objects like people and animals used for record keeping. Partial script.
        full script can represent everything that people say
        It's almost like asking if a programming language is Turing complete #m
        More and more signs were added to the Sumerian system. Gradually transforming it into a full script that we call cuneiform. They were issuing decrees recording, articles, and writing personal letters at 2500 BC.
        Akkadian became the spoken language, but Sumerian remained the language of administration and the language recorded with writing.
      - pre Columbian Incas, khipus colorful chords.
        Different knots on different chords with different colors. We have forgotten how to read them.
      - At the same time, Egyptian has developed the full script hieroglyphics
      - China 1200 BC
      - Central America, 1000 to 500 BC.
      - The most important historical works like the Bible, the Iliad, Mahabharata are oral works, and were transmitted for generations.
    - It was more complex to develop ways of organization and indexing than inventing writing #Claim
      - catalogs, dictionaries, calendars, forms, tables, techniques of retrieval. The brain works on Association networks. But they are proper to one person. We need Algorithms of thought. bureaucracy. #memory #Principle of Association
        900 ad. Arabic numerals. Invented by Hindus. When Arabs invaded India the income to the system. Understood its usefulness refined it and spread it throughout the Middle East and then to Europe, then adding the addition, subtraction, multiplication signs. This is a modern mathematical notation.
  - 1. there is no justice in history.
    - > It is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disallows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable
    - complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination.
      - Scholars know of no large society that has been able to dispense with discrimination all together.
      - hierarchies serve an important function, they enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted
    - Possibly the Hindu caste system took shape when indo Aryan people invaded the Indian subcontinent. 3000 years ago, the invaders who are oppressed in warriors stratified the society as servants and slaves invaders who are few in number of feared losing their privilege status and unique identity.
      - #legibility
      - contrast with what happened in China with assimilation of various "Barbarian" invaders #Chinese history
      - Fear of pollution has roots in biological survival mechanisms that make humans feel an instinctive revulsion towards potential disease carriers sick persons and dead bodies,
      - whenever a new profession developed or a new group of people appeared on the scene, they had to be recognized as a caste in order to receive a legitimate place within Hindu society
        groups that failed to win recognition as a caste were literally outcasts in this stratified society, they did not even occupy the lowest rung. They became known as Untouchables.
    - Part of the reason for importing slaves from Africa to the US was plantations in Virginia Haiti and Brazil, were plagued by malaria and yellow fever, which came from Africa, and Africans have a partial genetic immunity to these diseases. #slavery
    - One hierarchy has been of supreme importance in all known human societies, the hierarchy of gender.
      - Almost everywhere, men have got the better deal, at least since the agricultural revolution.
      - There is a text from 1200 BC in China, where someone, giving birth to a girl is described as unlucky
      - rule of thumb is:
        > Biology enables, culture forbids. Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It's culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others. Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural – whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist so it would need no prohibition.
        The concept of natural is taken from Christian theology.
        exaptation.
        There is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it first appeared hundreds of millions of years ago.
        Mouths appeared because the earliest multicellular organisms needed a way to take nutrients into their bodies. We use them to kiss speak, and pull pins other hand grenades.
        Wings developed in bugs to absorb more sunlight and stay warmer, some insects started using the things to glide
        chimpanzees use sex to cement political alliances, establish intimacy and defuse tensions.
      - Throughout the animal kingdom males tend to be more colorful and accessorize than females. Even before 1492 most societies in both America and Asia, were patriarchal, even though they had been out of contact for 1000s of years.
      - why?
        The most common theory is muscle power or strength allows them to monopolize tasks that demand hard manual labor plowing harvesting gives them control over food production, women are more resistant to hunger disease and fatigue. Many women can run faster and lift heavier weights. Women have throughout history been excluded mainly from jobs that require little physical effort, such as priesthood law and politics, while engaging in hard manual labor. People in their 60s exercise power over people in their 20s. Even though 20 somethings are much stronger than their elders.
        There is often an inverse relationship between physical progress and social power, the lower classes do the manual labor,
        the scum of society. Men are more violent than women, they're more willing to engage in raw physical violence. Studies of hormonal hormonal and cognitive systems strengthen the assumption that men have more aggressive and violent tendencies that are suited to serve as common soldiers.
        Women are stereotyped as better manipulators and appeasers than men famed for their superior ability to see things from the perspective of others, they should have made excellent politicians and Empire builders. This rarely happened in the real world.
        patriarchal genes suggest that through millions of years of evolution, men and women evolved different survival and reproduction strategies. Men competed against each other for the opportunity to impregnate fertile women. Individuals chance of reproduction dependent above all on his ability to outperform and defeat other men, ambitious aggressive competitive,
        the feminine genes that made it to the next generation belong to women who are submissive caretakers. There are many species of animals, such as elephants and bonobo chimpanzees, in which the dynamics between dependent females and competitive males results in a matriarchal society last century, gender roles, tremendous revolution.