Sapiens a brief history of humanity read online in full. Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens

The composition of Yuval Noah Harari “Sapiens. A Brief History of Humanity" literally fills the shelves of Moscow bookstores. The circulation of 7,000 copies, which is serious for popular science literature in the humanities, seems to confirm that this is not so much a commercial project as propaganda, another opus designated as “fashionable.” Indeed, it is highly recommended by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Will he give bad advice?

Harari is a true hero of our time. Israeli professor, lives in a homosexual marriage, practices meditation, vegan, animal rights activist. His most powerful pages are devoted, in fact, to how chickens, called to explore the world, and pigs, the most curious creatures in the world, suffer in narrow pens created by meat-eaters. At some point, you become imbued with the desire to release the living creatures into freedom, where, of course, they will be immediately eaten by predators and killed by diseases, but your conscience will be clear.

Harari treats the mammal called “man” much worse. The species is harmful and destructive - it destroys nature, destroys its own kind, killed all large animals in Australia and pre-Columbian America. This thesis, borrowed from the book “The Third Chimpanzee” by the American biologist Jared Diamond, is supplemented by another from the same source: with the invention of agriculture and animal husbandry, people became much more unhappy. Primitive hunters, healthy, almost without belongings, walked through the forests with songs, beat animals and rejoiced, and farmers were forced to work, without straightening their backs, on a cunning weed - wheat or corn, which managed to turn a stupid person into a manager of its reproduction. It’s even worse with livestock: Homo sapiens even torments lambs, and has contracted most of the harmful infections from them.

The author himself does not notice the contradiction between the two theses: if the hunters were so destructive that they killed off all the large fauna, then by switching to agriculture and cattle breeding, they simply saved the planet’s ecosystem, creating an entire artificial world for their food.

However, Harari generally does not care much about compliance with the facts. He sprinkles erroneous information, approximate judgments and blunders, and the few truly interesting data are drowned in a sea of ​​errors and therefore also seem like fiction. So, in his opinion, “in 1860, the majority of Americans came to the conclusion that blacks are people too and should be free,” this is about the election of Lincoln. In fact, "Big Abe" was a minority president - only 40 percent of voters voted for him, he won because the votes of his rivals were divided. At the same time, Lincoln never considered blacks “too people,” being a convinced racist. Having freed blacks to strike at the southerners, he always believed that Africans needed to be resettled on the Dark Continent.

Harari discusses the dependence of human societies on the solar cycle. Like, when there is little light and heat, the wheat only turns green, the barns are empty, people are hungry. If the sun is hot, then the harvest is harvested, the granaries are full, and the tax collectors are happy, and the kings are eager to fight. It is immediately clear that the professor had nothing to do with practical agriculture. The hungriest time of the year is between the spring equinox and the solstice, when old supplies have run out and the new harvest has not ripened, and the most well-fed time is from the autumn equinox to the winter solstice - that is, at the peak of darkness: the harvest has been harvested and you can take a break. Nature, of course, is launched by solar energy, but it does so with a hitch, as any peasant knows, but not a vegan historian.

Separately, it should be noted the purely liberal concept of economic change. According to Harari, economic growth in our era began because they came up with such a thing as a loan, which made it possible to start an enterprise. This is completely untrue. Credit was invented thousands of years ago. However, all these millennia, credit was not used to create enterprises, but for trade and wars. As a result, the loan had catastrophic problems with repayment. Let us remember how the Siena bankers went bankrupt because Edward III was unable to conquer France. Only the Pereire brothers came up with the idea of ​​lending to businesses for future sales and profits when they founded the Credit Mobile bank in the mid-19th century. By that time, the industrial revolution had been going on and bringing profit for a hundred years. So it was based on industry and increasing returns, not credit.

The author argues that France lost the competition for economic hegemony to England because French credit was discredited by the Mississippi Company and Law's machinations. He tells this story in detail, but not a word does not mention that a similar bubble of the South Sea Company in London burst at the same time. In both cases there were great losses, many politicians were involved, and corruption was revealed. Thus, the reason for France's loss in the epoch-making competition was anything but absolutism and the “bubbles” it caused.

And then when after that they tell you this story: “In 1860, Emperor Napoleon III ordered aluminum cutlery to be served only to the most honored guests, the rest had to make do with gold,” or this: “during the war, every BBC broadcast to occupied Europe began with the ringing of the Big Chimes Ben. German physicists managed to determine the weather in London by the slightest changes in the tone of the bells - invaluable information for the Luftwaffe. The British, having learned this, replaced live sound with recording,” then you simply don’t know whether these stories are true, or the same cheerful lies as in previous cases.

Much worse than superficiality is the self-confidence, if not the arrogance, with which Harari teaches his readers about morality and religion, or rather, the lack thereof. For him, let me remind you, man is an animal, one of tens of thousands of vertebrate species inhabiting the planet. Homo sapiens has no special place in the world, no calling from God, since God, like the family, the people, the state, are all fictions, useful ones, the author does not argue, but fictions. Before us is the one hundred and first retelling of the famous treatise by the atheist Dawkins, “The God Delusion.”

The fact that each of us can imagine something more than a person is a problem for the modern “evolutionary theory”, based on the idea of ​​the “blind watchmaker”: they say that mutations arise randomly, and some are grafted, others are not. A dog does not dream of a superdog, a person dreams of a superman and tries to consciously improve himself. Accordingly, it is completely incomprehensible how blind evolution could create a being of entire philosophy, the whole essence of which is in the denial of the idea of ​​blind evolution, in the desire to affirm one’s personality, to expand the boundaries of the possible. Evolutionists get around this issue by simply twisting the cards—by declaring that genetic evolution has given way to social evolution. But there is nothing in common between social reality and DNA codes. This means that either biological evolution is something other than the random rearrangement of DNA codes, or social evolution is not evolution.

Harari sidesteps this central theoretical problem by simply declaring the difficulty of evolutionary theory to be its “achievement”—the evolutionary peculiarity of homo sapiens is supposedly that it imagines what is not there and then takes its imaginings too seriously. Pure cheating.

The author insists that all differences between races, religions, and genders are fictitious and relative. He makes an exception for nations - they, of course, are also made up, but it is still impossible to prove that there is no cultural distance between a Swede and a Somali, and Harari grits his teeth at Marine Le Pen, who “speculates” on these differences.

The creator of “A Brief History...” sees a cure against nationalities in a planetary power, whose ideology will be absolute tolerance, erasing borders and universal consent: “We talked about the formation of a world empire. And this empire, like all previous ones, establishes peace within its borders. And since its borders contain the entire globe, the world empire will truly be an empire of peace.” From our time, it’s funny to read these speeches, written in 2012 with the endless Obama and Clinton in mind.

The author plays out his militant tolerance on Christianity, for which he has a pronounced hostility: “Some religions, for example, Christianity and Nazism, destroyed millions of people out of “righteous” hatred.” However, he is even condescending towards the Nazis, saying that Hitler was an “evolutionary humanist”, cared about the improvement of humanity, but the biological science of his time gave him the false idea that it was a matter of race, not genes. It turns out that if the Fuhrer acted now, he would work smarter: instead of persecuting Jews, he would amputate people’s genes for aggression and meat-eating. Does a vegan see a vegan from afar?

One way or another, the main subject of Harari's antipathy is the idea of ​​human freedom and individual individuality. He literally zombifies readers with the idea that a person submits primarily to the power of genes and hormones, that his actions are explained solely by the search for pleasure or by the influence of fictions such as religion, nation or morality, which are all relative.

As an example of such a purely human fiction, Harari cites the modern cult of “romantic consumerism.” It would never have occurred to an ancient Egyptian to go to Babylon for a sale. An Egyptian built his wife a tomb that she had dreamed about all her life... And today, romanticism teaches maximum self-disclosure and gaining new experience through the unusual, which is facilitated by foreign travel and the consumption of ever new goods and services. The marriage of romanticism and consumerism has created a whole market of experiences. See Paris, kiss at the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre, buy perfume and handbags, and die...

Here, as in many other cases, the author is telling an outright lie. Yes. The Egyptians did not go shopping to Babylon. They preferred importing experiences. This is what the inscriptions tell about the journey to the country of Punt, from where typical romantic curiosities and rarities were brought. That is, there was also a market for impressions in Egypt, but it was imported, not tourist.

Tourism originated in Ancient Greece. The first famous tourist to leave notes was Herodotus. Although a century before him, Solon became a tourist after establishing his laws. The Greeks developed the principles of experience hunting. They created a supporting canon of 7 miracles, including those same Egyptian tombs. They created extensive tourist guides, such as Pausanias’s “Description of Hellas,” which in some places is still practical to this day. Let's count how many centuries passed between Herodotus and romanticism? So the claim that our culture is a collection of “fictions” not rooted in human nature is false. It is false both when we talk about religion or nation, and when we talk about the perfume of Dolce and Gabbana.

From the point of view of the consistent biological evolutionism that Harari claims, the thought of a species whose members live forever should be terrifying. From the standpoint of human common sense - even more so. Imagine a world where the old live the lives of the young, each generation starts from scratch because there is no inheritance, there is an eternal prima donna on TV and all areas are controlled by mafias of immortals. In such a society, births will stop altogether, since there will simply be nowhere to put the children - the places are occupied. Here it’s time to write dystopias, not rejoice.

The horror is that a superficial book, filled with factual errors, ideological cheating and banal gay-vegan propaganda, is presented as an intellectual bestseller. People deprived of a systematic education and worldview, especially urban office plankton, assimilate it as higher knowledge and spread this tolerant neo-Nazism like a virus.

However, there is hope. Harari’s opus was written in 2011 at the peak of Obamaism, amid the roar of the “Arab Spring.” Today we already know where that revolutionary pandemonium led, and we see that the world has gone in the direction directly opposite to that indicated by the author. No global vegan-feminist empire - strengthening borders, defending identity, reviving national powers. Fortunately, man turned out to be not as “intelligent” as the author of “Sapiens” predicted. Sometimes it is useful to be simpler, not to seek good from good and to love simple things - family, people, Motherland, beauty and freedom.

In memory of my father Shlomo Harari

Yuval Noah Harari

A Brief History of Humankind

Copyright © Yuval Noah Harari 2011

This edition is published by arrangement with

The Deborah Harris Agency and Synopsis Literary Agency.

Translation from English by Lyubov Summ

Part one
Cognitive revolution

The rock paintings in the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave in the south of France are about 30 thousand years old. These works of art were created by people who looked, thought and spoke like us

Chapter 1
An inconspicuous animal

About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space appeared: the Big Bang occurred. Physics deals with the history of these fundamental phenomena of the Universe.

After 300 thousand years from the beginning of their existence, matter and energy began to form complex complexes with each other - atoms, and they began to be combined into molecules. Chemistry deals with the history of atoms, molecules and their interactions.

Approximately 3.8 billion years ago on planet Earth, certain molecules combined into large and complex structures - organisms. Biology studies the history of organic life.

About 70 thousand years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens, gave birth to something even more sophisticated - we call it culture. And the science of history itself is interested in the further fate of human cultures.

The course of human history was determined by three major revolutions. It began with the cognitive revolution, 70 thousand years ago. The agricultural revolution that occurred 12 thousand years ago significantly accelerated progress. The scientific revolution - it is only 500 years old - is quite capable of ending history and laying the foundation for something different, unprecedented. This book tells how the three revolutions affected people and other living beings - the faithful companions of people.

* * *

People existed long before the beginning of history. Animals very similar to modern humans first appeared 2.5 million years ago, but for countless generations they did not stand out among the billions of other creatures with which they shared their habitats.

On a walk through East Africa a couple of million years ago, you might have come across a completely familiar scene: tender mothers clutching their babies to their breasts, carefree children playing in the mud, passionate youth outraged by the dictates of convention, and tired old people asking to be left alone; machos beat themselves in the chest with their fists, trying to impress the local beauty, wise matriarchs look at what is happening and know that they have already seen all this more than once. Those ancient people knew how to play and love, strong relationships developed between them, they fought for power and status - but chimpanzees, baboons, and elephants behaved the same way. People were no different from animals. No one, and first of all the people themselves, could have predicted that their descendants would walk on the Moon, split the atom, unravel the genetic code and create chronicles. This must be remembered when we discuss prehistoric man: he was a very common animal and had no more impact on the ecological environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.

Biologists classify organisms into genera and species. Animals of the same species can copulate with each other, producing fertile offspring. Horses and donkeys share a close common ancestor and many common traits, but they show little or no mutual sexual interest. They can be forced to have sexual intercourse, and as a result, offspring will appear - mules, but the offspring will be infertile. This means that horses and donkeys belong to different species. In contrast, a bulldog and a spaniel may not look alike, but they mate willingly, and their offspring will be able to breed with other dogs and produce the next generation of puppies. Bulldogs and spaniels therefore belong to the same species - they are dogs.

Species descended from a common ancestor are grouped into a genus (genus). Lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars are different species of the genus Panthera. Biologists give double Latin names to living organisms, the first name denoting the genus, the second denoting the species. For example, lions - Panthera leo, that is, the view leo sort of Panthera. In all likelihood, any reader of this book - Homo sapiens, that is, belongs to the species sapiens(reasonable) kind Homo(Human).

Genera, in turn, are united into families - for example: felines (lions, cheetahs, domestic cats), canines (wolves, foxes, jackals) or elephants (elephants, mammoths, mastodons). All members of the family can trace their ancestry back to a certain ancestor. Thus, all cats, from the tiny house kitten to the ferocious lion, can be traced back to a single ancestor who lived approximately 25 million years ago.

AND Homo sapiens also belongs to a special family, although for a long time and stubbornly he kept this fact in the strictest confidence. Homo sapiens he preferred to imagine himself as the only one of his kind, separated from other animals - an orphan, without sisters and brothers, without step- or cousins, and most importantly, without parents. But this is a misconception. Like it or not, we are members of a large, noisy family of great apes (great apes). Among our living living relatives are chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons, of which chimpanzees are closest to us. Just 6 million years ago, an ape gave birth to two daughters. One became the ancestor of all living chimpanzees, the second is great-great-great, and so on, our grandmother.

Skeletons in the closet

Homo sapiens hides a darker secret: not only do we have many wild relatives, but we once had siblings. We have given ourselves the name “man,” but at one time the genus “man” included several species. People are animals of the kind Homo– appeared in East Africa about 2.5 million years ago as a branch of an older genus of monkeys Australopithecus, that is, “southern monkeys”. And two million years ago, some ancient men and women left their homeland and went to wander across the vast expanses of North Africa, Europe and Asia, where they settled. Because survival in the snowy forests of northern Europe required different qualities than survival in the steamy jungles of Indonesia, human populations evolved in different directions, resulting in different species, each of which scientists gave a pompous Latin name.

Has gained a foothold in Europe and Western Asia Homo neanderthalensis(Neander Valley Man), commonly referred to simply as "Neanderthal". Neanderthals, thicker and more muscular than modern humans, successfully adapted to the cold climate of Ice Age Europe. Lived on the island of Java Homo soloensis(a man from the Solo Valley), more adapted to life in the tropics. Another Indonesian island, the small island of Flores, is home to creatures that the popular press now tends to compare to hobbits. These dwarfs armed with spears, no more than a meter tall, weighed an average of 25 kilograms, but you cannot deny their courage. They even hunted local elephants - however, even the elephants here were dwarf. Explored the open spaces of Asia Homo erectus(Homo erectus), and this most enduring human species has survived there for over 1.5 million years.

In 2010, another lost brother returned from the depths of oblivion: during excavations of the Denisova Cave in Siberia, a petrified phalanx of a finger was discovered. Genetic analysis proved that the finger belongs to a previously unknown human species, which was named accordingly Denisovan man, Homo denisova. Who knows how many more forgotten relatives are waiting to be discovered - in other caves, on islands, in other climatic zones!

While these species of humans were evolving in Europe and Asia, evolution continued in East Africa. The Cradle of Humankind nurtured more and more new species, including Homo rudolfensis(Lake Rudolph Man) Homo ergaster(working person) and ultimately our own species, which we, without false modesty, dubbed Homo sapiens(reasonable person).

Some species of people turned out to be large, others were dwarfs. Among them there were fearless hunters and timid gatherers of plant food. Some lived exclusively within one island, while others explored entire continents. But these were all representatives of the clan Homo, in other words – humanity.

There is a popular misconception that all these species replaced each other as successors: Ergaster gives rise to erectus, erectus gives rise to Neanderthal, and you and I descend from Neanderthal. The linear model creates the false impression that there was only one human species on Earth at any given time and that all ancient species are outdated models of modern humans.

Our closest relatives (modern estimated reconstruction, from left to right): Homo rudolfensis (East Africa, 2 million years ago); Homo erectus (Asia, 2 million - 50 thousand years ago) and Homo neanderthalensis (Europe and Western Asia, 400 - 30 thousand years ago). These are all human beings

In fact, almost two million years - approximately until the 8th millennium BC. e. – several human species existed at the same time. Actually, why not? Many species of foxes, bears and pigs live now. A hundred thousand years ago, at least six species of humans walked the Earth. The exception to the rule (the exception that casts an ominous shadow of suspicion on us) is precisely the current exclusivity, and not the varied past. We will soon be convinced that Homo sapiens there are reasons to suppress any memory of extinct brethren.

The price of reason

For all their differences, the varieties of humanity have distinct common features. First of all, humans have disproportionately large brains compared to other animals. Mammals weighing 60 kilograms have an average brain volume of 200 cubic centimeters, but a sixty-kilogram Homo sapiens“grew” himself a brain with a volume of 1200–1400 cubic centimeters. 2.5 million years ago, the first men and women had smaller brains, but still significantly larger than, say, a leopard of the same weight. And as humanity developed, the disproportion increased.

It seems to us that it is hardly worth racking our brains over the question of why evolution encouraged this very brain. We are delighted with our intelligence and are convinced that the bigger and smarter the head, the better. But if this were an absolute truth, cats would also produce offspring capable of doing mathematical analysis. Why is there only one genus out of the entire animal kingdom? Homo acquired such a massive and complex thinking apparatus?

In fact, the larger the brain, the greater the cost to the entire body. Carrying it around with you everywhere is not easy, especially with a massive skull. It is even more difficult to feed this brain. U Homo sapiens The brain accounts for 2-3% of the total weight, but at rest the brain consumes up to 25% of the body's total energy expenditure. For comparison: in other primates, the brain at rest is content with only 8% of its total reserves. Ancient people paid dearly for an enlarged brain: firstly, they spent more time searching for food, and secondly, their muscles weakened. Like a government directing money toward education rather than the military, people were taking energy from their biceps and giving it to their neurons, which is not a good strategy for surviving on the savannah. A chimpanzee will not win a scientific argument with a person, but he can easily tear him apart.

But still, in some way it was beneficial, otherwise the brainy ones would not have given birth to even more brainy offspring. How did the brain compensate for the decrease in physical power? In the age of Albert Einstein, such a question may seem naive, but Einstein is a phenomenon of the modern era, and for two million years, while the neural networks in the human head grew and became more complex, people could only boast of flint knives and sharpened sticks. The evolution of the human brain is a mystery even more amazing than the appearance of the useless peacock's tail or the antlers that burden the head of a deer. What is all this for? The truth is, we don't know.

Another unique human trait is walking upright. Rising from all fours, it is more convenient to survey the savannah, looking out for prey or an enemy. With hands that are not involved in movement, you can do various things, for example, throw stones or give signals to relatives. The more functions the hands are used to performing, the more favorable the life of the owner of these hands was, and therefore evolution encouraged the appearance of more and more nerves and sensitive muscles in the palms and fingers. As a result, man learned to do the most complex things with his hands, and most importantly, to create sophisticated tools and use them. The first evidence of tool use appears 2.5 million years ago. It is the production and use of tools that are considered the defining feature by which archaeologists identify ancient people.

Upright walking, in addition to its advantages, also has disadvantages. The skeleton of our primate ancestors evolved over millions of years to accommodate a creature that ran on all fours and had a relatively small head. Adapting to upright walking was not so easy, and even on top of this entire structure it was necessary to hold a disproportionately large skull. To this day, humanity still pays for the ability to see into the distance and for skillful hands with neck pain and migraines.

The women paid double. Walking upright narrowed the hips, and therefore the birth canal, while babies' heads grew larger. Death in childbirth has become the main danger for females of our species. Women who gave birth to babies prematurely, while the skull was still relatively small and soft, had a better chance of survival and gave birth to more children. Thus, natural selection began to favor premature birth. Compared to other animals, human babies are born “underbaked”: many vital systems are not yet developed. Soon after birth, a foal is ready to trot, a one-month-old kitten can part with its mother and get its own food, and a human child remains helpless for many years, dependent on its elders, who feed, protect and teach it.

This circumstance led to the development of extraordinary social properties in humans - and to the emergence of equally unique social problems. A single mother is unable to feed herself and her offspring if she also has to babysit helpless babies. In raising children, significant help from relatives and neighbors was required. Only a tribe or community can raise a person. Evolution favored those who learned to form strong social bonds. In addition, because human babies are born underdeveloped, they are much more amenable to education and socialization than other animals. Mammals, for the most part, emerge from the womb ready-made, like a jar from a kiln: try to reshape such a vessel, and you will break or scratch it. Children come out of their mother's womb like molten glass - twist them, stretch them, shape them, do whatever you want. We can raise a child to be a Christian or a Buddhist, a supporter of capitalism or socialism, war or peace.

* * *

We consider a large brain, the ability to use tools, a high ability to learn, and complex social structures to be undeniable advantages. It seems certain that it was they who turned man into the king of nature. However, man enjoyed these advantages for 2 million years, while remaining a rather weak, almost marginal creature. All the species of people who settled from Indonesia to the Iberian Peninsula did not number even a million individuals, and their life would be more accurately called vegetation. They were in constant fear of predators, they rarely managed to kill large game, they subsisted mainly on plant food, and also caught insects and small animals and gnawed on carrion left by the stronger and more agile ones.

Ancient stone tools were used primarily to break bones and get to the brain. Some scientists believe that this was the ecological niche of humans. Just as the woodpecker specializes in extracting insects from tree trunks, so ancient people specialized in extracting bone marrow. Why exactly this? Well, imagine: before your eyes, a pack of lions hunted down and devoured a giraffe. You wait patiently on the sidelines. After the lions, it’s the turn of hyenas and jackals - you can’t fight them either. They gnaw at the bones, and only then does the human tribe decide to approach the skeleton. People look around warily and take on what is left to them.

This is the key to understanding human history and psychology. Until recently, the family Homo occupied not the top, but rather the middle position in the food pyramid. For millions of years, people hunted small animals and collected whatever they could get their hands on, trying to avoid encounters with large predators. Only 400 thousand years ago people began to regularly hunt large animals, and only in the last 100 thousand years, with the advent Homo sapiens, we have become the top link of this pyramid.

The consequences of such a rapid leap from an intermediate and dependent position to the top were colossal. A person is not used to being at a commanding height; he is not adapted to it. Other animals that ended up at the top of the pyramid - lions, sharks - took millions of years to get there, but man got to the top almost instantly. Many historical catastrophes, including destructive wars and violence against the ecosystem, stem from our too hasty breakthrough into power. Humanity is not a pack of wolves that suddenly took possession of tanks and atomic bombs; rather, we are a flock of sheep that, due to an incomprehensible whim of evolution, learned to make and use tanks and missiles. And armed sheep are much more dangerous than armed wolves.

Born Chefs

An important step on the way to the top was the taming of fire. We don't know exactly where, when or how it happened. But about 300 thousand years before the present, some people were already using fire regularly. It served them as a reliable source of heat and light and protection from the lions prowling around. A little more time passed, and people switched from defense to attack, and the first mass production appeared - the deliberate burning of forests. After waiting for the fire to die down, Stone Age entrepreneurs walked through the smoking fire, collecting charred animal carcasses, nuts, and tubers. This is how man learned to develop the territory: a well-directed flame turned impassable and food-poor forests into meadows full of tempting prey. But the main thing that fire did was cook food.

Having learned to cook, a person was able to use new types of products, he began to spend less time on food, he no longer needed powerful molars and a long intestine. Some scientists see a direct connection between the development of fire, a reduction in the length of the intestines and an increase in brain size: both a long intestine and a large brain require a lot of energy, and therefore it is difficult for the body to maintain both of them. By shortening the length of the intestines and reducing energy consumption, man was able to “grow” those huge brains for which Neanderthals and Homo sapiens 1 .

The development of fire created the first gap between man and other animals. All animals depend only on their body - on the strength of their muscles, the size of their teeth, their wingspan. They skillfully use air and sea currents, but do not know how to control the forces of nature and are initially limited by the peculiarities of their physical structure. Thus, eagles catch warm air currents rising from the ground, open their huge wings and allow the current to lift them high, but the eagle does not distribute the air currents in the way that is most convenient for it, and the maximum lifting force is always exactly proportional to the size of its wing.

When people mastered fire, they had a controllable and practically unlimited resource at their disposal. Unlike the eagle, man himself decides where and when to light the fire, and he has learned to use it for a variety of purposes. The most important thing: the power of fire is by no means determined by the shape, structure or power of the human body. A weak woman, having a flint and a cross or a burning stick, is capable of burning a forest in a few hours. The mastery of fire was a harbinger of the future: it was the first step towards the creation of an atomic bomb, and not such a small step.

Man (that is, individuals belonging to the species Homo) has been walking the Earth for 2 million 400 thousand years. Homo sapiens, our own evolved species of great ape, has been around for only 6% of that time - about 150 thousand years. So the book "Sapiens" should not be prefaced with the subtitle "A Brief History of Humankind." It's easy to see why Yuval Noah Harari devotes 95% of his book to us as a species: we know much more about ourselves than about other human species, including extinct ones. It is simply a fact that the history of sapiens - and Harari gives us that name - is only a small part of the history of mankind.

Can this entire period be covered in 400 pages? Not really. It is easier to describe a "short history of time" - all 14 billion years - and so Harari concentrates more on our present and possible future than on our past. Although the main historical lines of the path of sapiens are beyond doubt, and he presents them with vividness.

We spent the first half of our existence wandering aimlessly. Then we underwent a number of major changes. First, the “revolution of perception”: about 70 thousand years ago, we began to behave much smarter than before, for reasons still unknown, and began to rapidly spread throughout the planet. About 11 thousand years ago, we experienced an “agrarian revolution,” transforming everywhere from breadwinners (hunters and gatherers) to farmers. The "scientific revolution" began about 500 years ago. It provoked the industrial revolution (about 250 years ago), which provoked the information revolution (50 years ago), which provoked the biotechnological revolution, which, in fact, we are experiencing now. Harari suggests that the biotech revolution signals the imminent demise of sapiens: we will be replaced by bioengineered “superhumans,” “immortal” cyborgs capable of living forever.

This is one side of the coin. Harari briefly describes many significant developments, especially the development of language: we learn to think clearly about abstract things, to cooperate with each other on an ever-increasing scale, and, most importantly, to gossip. There is a rise in the institution of religion, and to a certain extent, militant monotheistic sentiments are slowly gaining the upper hand over polytheistic ones. Then comes the evolution of money and, more importantly, usury. Accordingly, empires and trade expand along with capitalism.

Harari rushes headlong through these vast and complex topics and does it in the best possible way - exciting and informative. The idea that “we didn't grow wheat. It was the wheat that raised us” is very elegant. Harari argues that there was a kind of “Faustian bargain between humans and crops” through which our species “rejected its intimate fusion with nature and rushed towards greed and alienation.” It was a bad deal: “the agricultural revolution was the greatest scam in history.” Much of it brought about poor nutrition, long hours of work, greater risk of hunger, crowded living conditions, increased susceptibility to disease, new forms of danger, and uglier forms of hierarchy. Harari believes that we fared much better in the Stone Age and makes strong statements about the evils of industrial farming: "Modern industrial agriculture is the greatest crime in history."

He agrees with the generally accepted view that the basic structure of our emotions and desires was not affected by any of these revolutions: “Our eating habits, our conflicts and our sexuality are all determined by the interaction of the hunter-gatherer brain with the current post-industrial environment, megacities, airplanes, phones and computers... Even if we now live in luxury apartments with all the amenities and a fully stocked refrigerator, our DNA still thinks we are running around on the savannah.” Harari gives a familiar example - our addiction to sugar and fat has led to the widespread availability of foods that become catalysts for health problems and ugliness. Pornography also illustrates the situation well. It's like heatstroke: if a porn addict's mind could be imagined as a body, he would be stricken with obesity.

At one point, Harari states that the "fundamental project of the scientific revolution" is the Gilgamesh Project (named after the epic hero who wishes to destroy death): "created with the goal of giving humanity eternal life" or "non-death." He looks forward to the successful completion of this project. But non-mortality does not equal immortality, since there is always the possibility of dying from violence, and Harari is adequately skeptical about how much good it will bring us. As non-mortals, we risk becoming hysterically and incapacitatingly cautious (Larry Niven develops this point well in his description of his “Pearson puppeteers,” the alien race from the Ringworld series). The deaths of those we love will become more terrible. We will get tired of the whole world under the sun - and even heaven (see the last chapter of "The History of the World in 10½ Chapters" by Julian Barnes). We will finally agree with J. R. R. Tolkien's elves, who perceived death as a gift to people that they themselves lacked. We will feel what Philip Larkin felt 1 B British poet, writer and jazz critic: “Beneath it all, the hope of oblivion rules.”

Even without all these arguments, there is no guarantee that non-death will bring great happiness. Harari cites well-known research that shows that human happiness is impressively NOT tied to material wealth. Of course, money matters - but only when it lifts us out of poverty. After crossing this line, the amount of money means very little. Of course, the lottery winner will feel in heaven, but after about 18 months his “average level of happiness” will fall back to the old level. If we traveled along the shores of the Pacific Ocean and then through the streets of Calcutta 2 Poor Indian city with a reliable “happy meter”, it is still unclear in which case the indicators would be higher.

This statement about happiness runs like a refrain through Sapiens. When Arthur Brooks (head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute) made a similar statement in The New York Times, he was criticized for trying to prop up the rich and justify income inequality. This criticism is disconcerting because while today's income inequality is disgusting and dangerous for everyone, the research on happiness is scientifically sound. But this does not stop Harari from suggesting that the lives people live today may be worse than life 15 thousand years ago.

Most of Sapiens is interesting and well-written. However, as you read on, the frivolity, exaggeration and sensationalism outweigh the book's strengths. Not to mention his abuse of the saying, “The exception proves the rule” (meaning that exceptional or rare cases test and confirm the rule, since the rule is found to apply even in those cases). There is a certain vandalism in Harari's sweeping judgments, his rashness about cause-and-effect relationships, and his crude truncation and stretching of data. Take his description of the Battle of Navarino 3 A major naval battle in 1827 between the united squadron of Russia, England and France, on the one hand, and the Turkish-Egyptian fleet, on the other.. He begins the story by saying that the British shareholders would have lost money if Greece had lost the war of independence, and then accelerates: “Because the state took the interests of the shareholders to heart, the British equipped an international fleet and in 1827, at the Battle of Navarino, sank the main naval force of the Ottoman Empire . After centuries of subjugation, Greece has regained its freedom." It’s too general - and yes, Greece later did not gain freedom. It is enough to look at the Wikipedia page dedicated to the Battle of Navarino to understand how bad everything is.

Harari hates “modern liberal culture,” but his attacks are cartoonish and boomerang back at himself. Liberal humanism, he says, is a “religion.” He "does not deny the existence of God"; “all humanists extol the human race”; “a huge gulf opens between the fundamental principles of liberal humanism and the latest scientific achievements.” This is silly. It's also sad to see that the great Adam Smith 4 Scottish economist and ethical philosopher; one of the founders of economic theory as a science, a representative of its classical school again exposed as a preacher of greed. Yet Harari is likely right that “only criminals buy houses by... handing over a suitcase full of money” - a point that is not without piquancy, given that around 35% of all purchases in the prime end of the London housing market are currently time paid in cash.

I was thinking about how to determine the genre of this book, and then I remembered that either in the 5th or 6th grade we had the subject “Stories on the History of the USSR.” This book is roughly in the same category, only instead of “USSR” you need to put “humanity”. And, of course, the main drawback of this book, as well as stories on the history of the USSR, is extreme indoctrination, i.e. “transmission of the fundamental tenets of a belief system.”

“Stories on the History of the USSR” had to be rewritten every 10 years, because the previous concept became anti-Soviet, and “Brief Histories of Humanity” also needed to be rewritten every 20 years (I don’t undertake to indicate the exact interval, maybe every 10 or every 50 years), because previous concepts become outdated and become anti-scientific.

The main task of the scientific revolution, according to Harari, is to overcome death and make man immortal. Whether this task is achievable is a separate and big question. It can be assumed that scientists will be able, and quite likely in the near future, to extend human life to the Methuselah years, but the danger of violent deaths, the emergence of new viruses, etc. will not disappear. But suppose the information stored in the human brain could be written to disk, and then played back, and even made to learn, engage in communication with other people or disks, and produce new information. This is a noble goal, although whether it will lead to “happiness” in Harari’s sense remains a mystery.

It seemed to me that the author was struggling with his religiosity, wanted to talk it out, get rid of it. If in the Abrahamic religions there is one God, then the author is trying to prove that there are many gods (by which we should understand not only idols, but also doctrines and various kinds of “fictions”), and in general, polytheism is good; if “man is the image and likeness of God,” then no, according to Harari, this is sapiens, “he (man) was the most common animal and had no more influence on the ecological environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.”

I want to be understood correctly: I am not at all trying to debate with Harari and refute the concepts he defends. I consider these concepts to be insufficiently substantiated, and I am sure that in 10-20-50 years the “structure of scientific revolutions” will experience the next tectonic shifts, and scientists will stand on other scientific platforms. But the ardent faith with which the author preaches suggests that sincerely, somewhere deep in the subconscious, he believes in something completely different.

Even his dream of achieving immortality through science and technology is, if you think about it, an atheistic goal. Man is mortal - this is how G-d intended. Whether there is any existence beyond the grave is a matter of faith. Fighting death as a destiny, a person kills God, and faith in a transcendent existence loses its meaning. I do not at all want to say that this is a harmful or dangerous doctrine, it is certainly a noble one, and perhaps will lead to positive results. I just see that this is a religious concept, albeit with the prefix “anti”.

Sometimes he leaves out important information and repeats old, long-debunked legends. For example, when he writes about the colonization of America, he fails to note that the Indians were largely killed not by the Spanish conquistadors, but by viruses and bacteria brought by the Spaniards and other Europeans. Maybe the Europeans would be interested in the survival of the American population, and then they would not have to import slaves from Africa? And how long can we repeat the fable that the Aztecs considered the Spaniards to be gods and demons? Maybe this was the case during the first meeting, but pretty quickly the Aztecs figured out who they were dealing with.

“When the Muslims conquered India, they did not bring with them archaeologists to systematically study local history, anthropologists to delve into Indian cultures...” As systematic scientific disciplines, archeology and anthropology did not exist at the time of the Muslim conquest of India. But you can point to the fundamental work “India” by Al-Biruni (11th century), with a detailed description of India and its cultures. This work is still considered an important source of information on the history of the subcontinent. Al-Biruni was a Persian who wrote in Arabic. He completed the book in 1030, the same year that the army of Mahmud of Ghazni burned Varanasi.

There are many such errors and omissions in the book, which reveal the author’s superficial knowledge. The chapter “The Creed of Capitalism” was written as if by a freshman who had read Facebook nonsense about the “real sector” and “printing money.”

Some of Harari's concepts are not just poorly founded, but ridiculous. For example, the author’s belief that people in pre-agrarian societies were “happier” than people who took up farming after the agrarian revolution. Do you know why? “They had as much leisure as they wanted for gossip, leisurely stories, playing with children, rest and sleep.” It is clear that the author is throwing his individual ideas about happiness into the past. Let’s imagine an office worker whose mother-in-law forces him to pick potatoes on his day off. Of course, happiness does not come from potatoes. Elsewhere, the author writes that “wheat provided far more calories per unit area than all previous food sources, and Homo sapiens began to multiply exponentially.” P. 104. So isn’t this what happiness is?

“Science explains phenomena that exist in the world, how things work, what can happen. By definition, it does not undertake to predict how and what will happen - this is what religions and ideologies do.” P.332. What about Halley and his comet? The proof of the theory of periodic rotation of comets was precisely the prediction that a comet would appear in 1758. Science predicts, and if it does not undertake to predict something, it is only due to its limitations. For example, a big limitation of modern science is the inability to accurately predict earthquakes. But, say, in 10-20-50 years, after accumulating new data and conducting new research, science will be able to predict earthquakes, just as it previously learned to predict bad weather.

Let's give the author credit: he cites a lot of facts. Some facts were unknown to me. For example, I did not know that natural selection encouraged premature birth in female sapiens: upright walking narrowed the hips of females and enlarged the heads of babies, as a result it became safer and easier to give birth to babies prematurely while the baby's skull was relatively small and soft. P. 16. I did not know that in the closed part of the Vatican there is a fresco by Vasari glorifying the Night of St. Bartholomew as a victory over heretics. P. 264. Another interesting fact: during WWII, Germany lasted so long, until 1918, thanks to the invention of obtaining ammonia, necessary for explosives, “literally from thin air.” Before this, saltpeter was used, and its deposits were located in India and China. P. 413.

Harari is aphoristic. Here, for example, are some funny aphorisms: “Surplus food turned out to be the fuel of progress” p.127, “any imaginary hierarchy denies its fictionality and proclaims itself natural and necessary.” pp. 167-168 “money is not a material reality, but a psychological construct.” P. 222. “Real peace is the impossibility of war.” P. 450.