This is a book I spent a long time reading. It’s thick, covers an enormous range of topics, and tackling the original English edition was challenging. But thankfully, I finally finished it — today (February 2023). A real sense of accomplishment.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a grand history book that comprehensively introduces the development of human civilization. I’ve always enjoyed learning about human history, immersing myself in its weight and the vitality of civilizational progress.
The Cognitive Revolution and Fiction#
Conventional views of human history hold that humanity’s first major evolution or revolution was learning to use tools. Like in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where apes bang bones together as the iconic BGM plays — but that’s science fiction. Sapiens argues that humanity’s first major revolution was the Cognitive Revolution, the key distinction between humans and animals. Learning to walk upright didn’t just free our hands — more importantly, it freed our minds. Four-legged running animals never evolved the way we did because harsh natural environments demanded stronger bodies and limbs for speed. Walking upright obviously makes you slower, so group living and tool use compensated. But group living and tools aren’t unique to Sapiens — many animals live in groups, and chimpanzees use tools too. What set Sapiens apart was learning to manufacture weapons, boats, and sustain much larger social groups. They walked from Africa to the Middle East, to Europe, battling the physically stronger Neanderthals and ultimately taking their territory. They reached the Far East, crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas, and even sailed to Australia. This ability to craft complex tools and communicate at unprecedented levels — that’s what the Cognitive Revolution brought.
Neanderthals themselves have gone extinct, but recent research shows the vast majority of humans carry a small amount of Neanderthal DNA — except for indigenous Africans. This suggests Neanderthals weren’t entirely wiped out by Sapiens; a small number interbred with Sapiens and their genes spread across the world. This is also key evidence supporting the Out-of-Africa theory of human origins.
The book gives a classic example of the Cognitive Revolution: imagine a lion by the river. One Sapiens sees it and tells others. The others then construct in their minds the idea that “there is a lion by the river” — even though they don’t know for certain whether one is actually there. The prerequisite is that Sapiens had to learn to conceive of things that aren’t immediately present. More importantly, once they mastered this skill, language, fiction, lies, power, social structures followed… Neanderthals clearly exchanged far less information than Sapiens.
The Cognitive Revolution had an enormous impact on civilizational development. It allowed the construction of things that don’t actually exist — gods, religions, power, money, social structures, dynasties… Take a company, for example. A company is really a social construct; it doesn’t actually exist in the physical world. A company can be a stack of 4A paper with a stamp in a document bag — but that’s just paper. Employees believe the company exists because their minds believe it does. Everyone believes it exists, but the company itself is a fiction in human minds — the entity “company” does not exist in the real world.
Money#
How did money come about? In a world without money, stable social structures gave rise to barter trade. But as the variety of traded goods increased, the number of equivalent exchange equations grew exponentially. When trading shoes for a rake, it’s a simple one-for-one swap. Add a donkey, and you have three exchange equations: shoes-rake, rake-donkey, shoes-donkey. As goods multiply, the number of exchange equations becomes a combinatorial explosion — and that’s not even accounting for multi-item trades. Then an intermediary — money — appeared and solved the problem instantly. Everything only needed to be equated with money. Money served as the universal equivalent for all goods, and the convenience of trade improved dramatically. Early forms of money were diverse, with shells being the most common. If shells were too easy to obtain, someone could buy up everything in the market, so shell-based monetary civilizations were typically inland. Since people carried money in their pockets to buy things or hoarded it at home, and worried that too-easy acquisition of currency would disrupt markets, gold — rare, resistant to decay, difficult to mine — became humanity’s primary currency for long periods. In ancient Europe, many kings minted gold coins bearing their portraits or logos, resulting in a vast variety of European gold coins. Ancient China was somewhat different: starting with shells unearthed at Sanxingdui, then bronze coins during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, then gold, silver, copper, and paper money (jiaozi) across dynasties. China didn’t stick to gold like Europe did, mainly because the population was too large and gold reserves too small, making gold too valuable — they needed other metals to create a monetary gradient to smooth trade across different scales.
There’s another great insight in the book: money and religion both have a certain transmissibility. Money and religion are essentially no different — they are both human constructs, fictions. Their only difference: religion tells you what you should believe, while money tells you what others believe.
Columbus and Zheng He#
The Age of Discovery, the early Industrial Revolution. Europeans were passionate about exploring the world’s unknown territories. After Europeans learned the Earth was round, lacking good surveying tools, Columbus set sail westward from Europe aiming for India. They crossed the Atlantic and reached a landmass, encountered the locals, thought they’d reached India, and called them “Indians.” To this day, “Indian” in the United States carries both meanings. Europeans realized the world still had many corners untouched (at least by relatively modern civilization). They redrew world maps, filling unknown regions with sea monsters and leviathans. These maps are still widely used in video games — for instance, Civilization VI uses sea monster maps for unexplored territory, waiting to be discovered. Europeans eagerly sought new lands, and soon South America, New Zealand, Australia, and countless small islands were discovered and claimed. Where local civilizations were too far behind — the Aztec, Native American, Māori, Tasmanian civilizations — they were brutally massacred, their lands occupied by white settlers.
When the Aztec civilization encountered Spaniards clad in gleaming iron armor and wielding sharp iron swords, they thought those men were gods. They couldn’t comprehend such hard clothing and weapons — they must have been sent by the gods. And then they were deceived and slaughtered by “higher civilization.”
Zheng He’s ships were called “dragon boats” (the original text says this, even includes illustrations — I think it may be a mistake, or Westerners assumed any ship with a dragon figurehead was a dragon boat). They were several times larger than Columbus’s ships and set sail one to two centuries earlier. Zheng He’s fleet, with far superior technology, discovered new lands but didn’t occupy them — they traded with the locals. The book argues that Europeans were more adventurous and aggressive, thus ushering in the Age of Discovery. It seems Europeans hold a relatively friendly view of the Ming Dynasty. In Civilization VI, only three Chinese leaders appear: Qin Shi Huang, Wu Zetian, and Zhu Di — and only Zhu Di of the Ming Dynasty is the “tall build” development-focused leader.
Closing#
Retracing the development of human civilization lets us understand where we came from, what we’re doing now, and explore where we’re headed. This love for the subject is also why I enjoy strategy games like Civilization VI and Humankind. When you plant rice, domesticate horses, mine salt, iron, coal, oil, uranium… there’s a thrill of human progress.
I’d like to close with a quote from Civilization VI, a game I’ve played for over 400 hours: “From the first stirrings of life beneath the water… to the great beasts of the Stone Age… to man taking his first upright steps, you have come far. Now begins your greatest quest.”