Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Sapiens, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Foraging, Industry, and Human Happiness
Fiction, Cooperation, and Culture
Science, Wealth, and Empire
Human-Caused Ecological Devastation
Summary
Analysis
Until about 10,000 years ago, Sapiens foraged for food. Our tendency to binge on sugary foods today is a remnant of our ancient foraging past. Sweet fruits are a good source of energy. It benefitted ancient Sapiens to gorge on fruits (before other animals got to them) whenever they crossed paths with fruit trees. Theorists also attempt to connect modern social dynamics with our ancient history. Some think ancient Sapiens mated with multiple partners and raised their children communally, like chimpanzees do. Others argue that monogamy and the nuclear family are intrinsic to our nature. Harari will explore Sapiens’ history between the Cognitive Revolution (70,000 years ago) and the Agricultural Revolution (12,000 years ago) to offer his own insights.
Harari compares early human hunter-gatherer societies (70,000–12,000 years ago) with subsequent farming-based societies (12,000–10,000 years ago). For Harari, the invention of agriculture radically changed the way humans functioned in the ecosystem: they stopped living nomadically and gathering food in the wild, and they started forming permanent settlements and farming crops. The shift from foraging to farming impacted the entire animal ecosystem, which why Harari deems it another “revolution.” Harari brings up human societies before and after the Agricultural Revolution because he (controversially) thinks ancient foragers were happier and better off than their farmer descendants.
Themes
It’s hard to speculate about the hunter-gatherer period of Sapiens’ history because there are so few artifacts from that time period (in contrast to modern Sapiens life today, which is littered with artifacts like cars, clothes, phones, books, art, trash, and more). Some theorists look at modern forager societies, but Harari thinks there are too many differences to account for. First, agriculture influences modern hunter-gatherer societies. Second, most modern hunter-gatherers live in terrain that’s inhospitable to farming. Third, modern hunter-gatherer societies are so varied that it’s hard to generalize based on their cultures. For example, when European colonists first arrived in Australia, they met some Aboriginal Australian tribes that were patriarchal and others that were matriarchal.
Harari emphasizes that comparisons between early farming societies and earlier forager societies is highly speculative: there’s not much data (and few artifacts) from that time, and modern forager societies are incredibly diverse, meaning it’s hard to make generalizations about them and project them onto the past. Harari still intends to piece together a story about how ancient foragers enjoyed a higher quality of life than subsequent agricultural societies, but he wants the reader to remember his suggestions involve a lot of guesswork.
Themes
Many theorists debate over the “natural way of life” in ancient Sapiens hunter-gatherer societies. However, Harari thinks that there’s no such thing. He argues that—like modern hunter-gatherer societies—ancient Sapiens’ lifestyles were very ethnically and culturally diverse, partly because the Cognitive Revolution (and the ability to imagine fictional realities) enabled a wide diversity of norms and lifestyles, based on the myths people believed in.
Harari reinforces the idea that his claims about foragers are highly speculative by restating that ancient foraging societies were likely incredibly diverse, and organized in a myriad of ways. This is likely because different forager communities rallied around different myths and organized their societies differently.
Themes
Harari does offer some generalizations about pre-agricultural era Sapiens societies. He suggests they lived in small, mostly human bands—in which “loneliness and privacy were rare”—ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred people, along with some dogs (the only animals Sapiens domesticated before the Agricultural Revolution). They cooperated with some bands (notably, when they shared common myths and values) and competed with others. They traded pigments, shells, and information, but not food. They tended to roam within the same general territory. Once in a while, some bands split off to explore new territory, triggering Sapiens’ worldwide expansion. More permanent villages cropped up where food sources where consistent, such as alongside seas and rivers.
Harari paints a picture of ancient foraging societies based on the sparse data that is available about life in that time. In stressing that “loneliness and privacy were rare,” he subtly hints that agricultural (and subsequent industrial) societies are much more isolating, suggesting that a laborer’s life in an agricultural or industrial society is actually unhappier than the life of a forager. Harari also notes that foraging societies were more nomadic than farming societies. He brings this up because he thinks permanent settlements harbor more disease, which also made life worse off for farmers.
Themes
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Foragers needed intimate knowledge of food sources in their home territory. They also needed razor-sharp alertness to handle predators, and fine-tuned motor skills to manipulate stone and wood into tools. Harari contends that foragers’ knowledge about their habitats was deeper and more abundant than ours today. He even suggests that Sapiens’ brain size decreased after the foraging era ended—because modern humans don’t need to know much about our natural surroundings to survive, and we depend much more heavily on others than foragers did.
Harari wants to question the idea that more developed societies are necessarily better than simple, ancient foraging societies. He thinks it’s a mistake to assume ancient foragers were simpler and dumber than their modern counterparts. Harari thinks ancient foragers (living between 70,000 and 12,000 years ago) had rich and rewarding connections to their natural habitat, which left them better off than their descendants who lived in farming-based societies.
Themes
Harari also argues that foragers lived relatively comfortable and happy lifestyles, averaging 35 or so hours per week of communal (social and friendly) roaming, food-gathering, and dwelling-oriented tasks. In comparison, laborers in developing countries clock an average 60–80 hours a week, doing mind-numbing, isolating, and repetitive work each day. Compared to farmers in the agricultural era, ancient diets were more varied, nutritious, and less susceptible to famines from disasters that wiped out a particular crop. Foragers also suffered fewer infectious diseases (which, in agricultural societies, tended to be passed from domesticated animals to humans and spread to other humans living close together in cramped, permanent settlements).
Harari wants to argue that life wasn’t necessarily tougher and harder for ancient foragers living without modern conveniences. He suggests that modern-day laborers suffer more than ancient foragers did—both physically and mentally. Physically, he thinks modern laborers work more hours each week, which leaves them more tired, and they suffer from more food insecurity, meaning they’re likely more malnourished and therefore likely suffer more disease. Mentally, he thinks a forager’s work is much more interesting and satisfying than industrial labor, suggesting that modern-day laborers not only work harder, but their work is more boring, which makes them unhappy.
Themes
Despite foragers’ wholesome diets, short work weeks, and the scarcity of infectious disease, Harari warns against idealizing their lifestyles. Their lives also involved a lot of hardship. Infant mortality rates were very high, minor accidents could be deadly, and people who didn’t get along within their bands must have “suffered terribly” from mocking and hostility. Foragers also likely abandoned or slayed people who couldn’t keep up (like unwanted children or burdensome elders). Harari discusses the nomadic Aché people of modern Paraguay, who also slay their elders and abandon their weak. On the other hand, they enjoy sexual freedom and are unburdened by the pursuit of wealth or possession.
Harari acknowledges that ancient foragers suffered some physical hardships as well—like having no access to modern medicine and enduring high death rates. He also thinks they must have faced painful emotional and mental hardships as well—like worrying about shunned or abandoned by their communities and dying in the wild. Nonetheless, Harari still believes that ancient foragers had better lives than laborers in farming and industrial societies overall. He also suggests that modern people tend to think people in foraging societies are worse off because they don’t typically have access to modern conveniences. However, Harari thinks modern foragers (like the Aché people in Paraguay) are actually better off because they don’t base their lives around acquiring possessions. Harari implies that modern conveniences aren’t benefits, but detriments to a person’s quality of life. He’ll expand on this idea as the chapter develops.
Themes
Harari wonders about ancient hunter-gatherers’ spiritual and mental lives. Many scholars argue that archaic Sapiens were “animists,” meaning they believed that all physical phenomena (including rocks, streams, and living things) were alive, and that they could communicate with other entities through song, dance, and rituals. Harari is cautious about make assumptions about the inner mental lives of ancient Sapiens. He believes such claims merely expose modern theorists’ biases, rather than say anything substantive about our ancient ancestors. For Harari, we simply don’t know what ancient Sapiens believed, what festivals they celebrated, and what stories they told—it’s one of the “biggest holes in our understanding of human history.”
Although Harari has already made substantive claims about the mental lives of foragers in pre-agricultural societies—namely, that they were happier overall—he also reminds the reader that his claims are wildly speculative. He’s alluding to the fact that a lot of modern theorizing is based on data plus substantive interpretation, meaning it’s not rooted solely in facts and it can get things wrong, especially in contexts where there’s very little data available, such as speculating about very early human societies.
Themes
For Harari, it’s also difficult to speculate about social hierarchies in hunter-gatherer societies. Scholars can’t even agree on basics like monogamy and family structure. Harari thinks some societies may have been hierarchical and competitive (like chimpanzee communities), while others may have been relaxed and peaceful (like bonobo communities). Ancient Sungir burial remains (from 30,000 years ago show) children’s bodies adorned with thousands of ivory beads: this could suggest that they’d inherited a high rank, but it could also suggest that the children were decorated as sacrifices. It’s hard to know more beyond wild speculation.
Harari uses the example of Sungir burial remains to show how the same data (e.g., children’s bodies adorned with beads) can prompt two completely different theories about what actually went on in ancient societies. He thus underscores his claim that data-based theories aren’t rooted solely in facts—there’s a lot of guesswork involved. He hints here that the reader shouldn’t assume a theory is reliable just because it’s based on data or evidence. He’ll explore this idea more fully when he addresses modern science later in his argument.
Themes
Harari thinks it’s also difficult to know if hunter-gatherer societies were typically peaceful or violent. Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies (in the Kalahari Desert and Australia) do engage in armed conflict, but they’ve also been impacted by European imperialism, so it’s difficult to speculate about the past from their activities. Archaeologists also discovered 400 ancient human remains in the Danube Valley, five percent of which had cracked skulls (suggesting they died from blows to the head), but this case could have been a one-off anomaly. Harari thinks that ancient forager communities engaged in different levels of violence, meaning some were peaceful, and others were violent, just like humans in the world today.
Once again, Harari stresses how interpreting data involves a lot of speculation and guesswork to show the reader that theories involve both facts and interpretation: and the interpretations might be wrong. In this case, the “data” is cracked skulls, and the “interpretation” is that foragers were more violent than modern humans. Harari wants to question the popular idea that ancient foragers lived in violent communities and therefore had worse lives. This subtly reinforces his own speculation about ancient foragers living better—rather than worse—lives than their descendants did.
Themes
To Harari, there’s a tangible blind spot surrounding many aspects of ancient foraging Sapiens communities, which spans tens of thousands of years. He suggests that many complex and fascinating political dramas might have unfolded in our early history (for example, between Sapiens and Neanderthal humans). We simply lack access to evidence from this time period, but that doesn’t mean nothing important happened.
Harari questions the idea that ancient societies (70,000 s–12,000 years ago) were necessarily more primitive, unsophisticated, and generally worse than the subsequent agricultural and industrial societies that emerged in the last 12,000 years. He suggests they might have been far superior in many ways, but humanity will never know, because there’s little data from that time.
Themes
