Sapiens

Humans fed on wild plants and hunted wild animals without interfering in their breeding for over two million years. About 10,000 years ago, however, Sapiens began manipulating their environments by sowing plant seeds (including wheat, rice, maize, potatoes, legumes, olive trees, and grapevines) and domesticating animals for labor or food (especially goats, sheep, pigs, and horses). This “Agricultural Revolution” occurred independently in the Middle East, Central America, and China. Modern Sapiens still live on a small handful of plant and animal species that were domesticated between 10,000 and 2,000 years ago.

Many scholars depict the Agricultural Revolution as a giant leap forward for humankind, but Harari disagrees. In fact, he calls the Agricultural Revolution “history’s biggest fraud.” Harari thinks hunter-gatherers had more knowledge of their natural environment, and they lived more satisfying lives. He even suggests that Sapiens didn’t domesticate plants like wheat. Rather, the plants domesticated us. Harari argues that before the Agricultural Revolution, Sapiens lived comfortable, free lives as wandering hunter-gatherers with varied diets. After it, however, humans toiled endlessly, clearing land to farm wheat and building homes near their crops.

Harari argues that the Agricultural Revolution trapped hunter-gatherers to lives of endless labor (which was needed to clear land and tend crops), violence (through battles for land to raise crops), poorer nutrition (from diets that were restricted to one crop), and food insecurity (because a bad season or natural disaster could trigger a famine). Harari thinks the Agricultural Revolution aimed to keep more people alive in much poorer conditions, and that doesn’t seem so great to him.

Harari explains that the shift from foraging to farming happened gradually. At first, roaming foragers camped for a few weeks and gathered wild wheat to help them survive the winters. As they gathered wheat, they dropped more seeds, which made more wheat grow. Wheat became more abundant, and humans started settling for longer periods of time around wheat fields. They eventually learned how to make more wheat grow (by planting seeds instead of letting them drop, by watering them, and so on). Foraging humans also reared fewer children, because it was harder to keep children alive in roaming communities. As Sapiens began living more sedentary lives (to be near the wheat crops), they began having more children, which increased their dependency on wheat.

For Harari, the effort to live easier lives (by settling near wheat fields) inadvertently ended up making life harder. Sedentary communities suffered more infectious disease, and growing populations demanded more labor to feed. He also thinks the same insight applies today: we devote endless labor to pursue education, work, homes, cars, and it takes us longer and longer to reach a point when we can stop working and enjoy our lives. Harari also thinks the “luxuries” humans invent to make our lives easier—like washing machines and the internet—actually cause us more stress and make us less relaxed in life.  

Many scholars assume that the Agricultural Revolution enabled more sophisticated cultures to evolve. They argue that as people settled, they began expanding their cultural horizons and building temples. Harari, in contrast, argues that the discovery of a 10,000-year-old temple (called Göbekli Tepe) predates evidence of wheat farming in that area, suggesting that foragers started building the temple first, and then needed to settle and start farming to enable them to complete it.

The Agricultural Revolution also radically altered life for many animals. At first, humans began following wild herds and killing more aggressive individuals to stop them breeding, thereby gradually taming the herd. Today, we control every aspect of domesticated animals’ breeding. In evolutionary terms, it seems like domesticated animals (like sheep and chickens) are thriving, since they’re far more numerous in the modern world than they would have been in the ancient wild. Harari disagrees. He argues that domesticated animals lead shorter, more miserable lives. For example, a wild chicken can live for years, but most domesticated chickens are slaughtered within a few weeks of being born.

Admittedly, not all animals suffered in agricultural societies. Pets and racehorses, for example, could wind up with quite luxurious lives. Historically, humans valorized the image of shepherds lovingly tending their flocks, but Harari thinks that if we look at the situation from the flock’s perspective, the Agricultural Revolution was catastrophic. Harari thinks that many plants thrived as a result (like wheat, which is now ubiquitous in the world), but when it comes to creatures with complex emotional lives (like animals and humans), the Agricultural Revolution shows us that larger populations often increase “individual suffering.” Harari concludes that the more powerful Sapiens become, the more individual suffering we cause.