This video is the summary of the book 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' by Yuval Noah Harari in Tamil.
About the Book:
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Hebrew: קיצור תולדות האנושות, Qitzur Toldot ha-Enoshut) is a book by Yuval Noah Harari, first published in Hebrew in Israel in 2011 based on a series of lectures Harari taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in English in 2014. The book, focusing on Homo sapiens, surveys the history of humankind, starting from the Stone Age and going up to the twenty-first century. The account is situated within a framework that intersects the natural sciences with the social sciences.
Harari's work places human history within a framework, with the natural sciences setting limits for human activity and social sciences shaping what happens within those bounds. The academic discipline of history is the account of cultural change.
Harari surveys the history of humankind from the Stone Age up to the 21st century, focusing on Homo sapiens. He divides the history of Sapiens into four major parts.
The Cognitive Revolution (c. 70,000 BCE, the start of behavioral modernity when imagination evolved in Sapiens).
The (first) Agricultural Revolution (c. 10,000 BCE, the development of agriculture).
The Unification of Humankind (c. 34 CE, the gradual consolidation of human political organizations towards globalization).
The Scientific Revolution (c. 1543 CE, the emergence of objective science).
Harari's main argument is that Sapiens came to dominate the world because they are only animal that can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. He argues that prehistoric Sapiens were a key cause of the extinction of other human species such as the Neanderthals and numerous other megafauna. He further argues that the ability of Sapiens to cooperate in large numbers arises from its unique capacity to believe in things existing purely in the imagination, such as gods, nations, money and human rights. He argues that these beliefs give rise to discrimination – whether racial, sexual or political – and it is potentially impossible to have a completely unbiased society. Harari claims that all large-scale human cooperation systems – including religions, political structures, trade networks and legal institutions – owe their emergence to Sapiens' distinctive cognitive capacity for fiction. Accordingly, Harari describes money as a system of mutual trust and political and economic systems as similar to religions.
Harari's key claim regarding the Agricultural Revolution is that while it promoted population growth for Sapiens and co-evolving species like wheat and cows, it made the lives of most individuals (and animals) worse than they had been when Sapiens were mostly hunter-gatherers, since their diet and daily lives became significantly less varied. Humans' violent treatment of other animals is a theme that runs throughout the book.
In discussing the unification of humankind, Harari argues that over its history, the trend for Sapiens has increasingly been towards political and economic interdependence. For centuries, the majority of humans lived in empires, and capitalist globalization is effectively producing one, global empire. Harari argues that money, empires, and universal religions are the principal drivers of this process.
Harari describes the Scientific Revolution as an innovation in European thought, whereby elites became willing to admit to and try to remedy their own ignorance. He describes this as one driver of early modern European imperialism and of the current convergence of human cultures. Harari also claims there is a lack of research into the history of happiness, positing that people today are not significantly happier than in past eras. He concludes by discussing how modern technology may soon end the species by ushering in genetic engineering, immortality, and non-organic life. Harari metaphorically describes humans as deities in that they can create species.
Harari cites Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) as one of the greatest inspirations for the book.
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00:00 - Introduction
01:13 - An Animal of No Significance
06:16 - The Tree of Knowledge
11:17 - A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve
13:08 - History's Biggest Fraud
16:58 - Building Pyramids
25:25 - There is No Justice in History
30:46 - The Arrow of History
34:51 - The Scent of Money
39:17 - The Discovery of Ignorance
42:23 - The Capitalist Creed
47:43 - The Wheel of Industry
52:07 - A Permanent Revolution
54:15 - The Animal that Became God
55:35 - And They Lived Happily Ever After