Review of “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”
Part 3, History Of Primeval Human Development: Preliminary Concerns
by Daniel H Chew
Book: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London, UK: Penguin Random House, 2011)
Outline:
Specific critiques: History of primeval human development: preliminary concerns
Specific critiques: The problem of induction; Christianity and the Nature of Religion
Part Three: The history of primeval human development: Preliminary concerns
Historians traditionally refer to history before the time of writing as pre-history, as basically there is not much to go on to reconstruct what life was like prior to written history. The time before written history was the time of the gods, or the oral traditions passed down generation to generation before these myths were finally written down. Of course, humans are not known for being satisfied with ignorance. With the modernist impulse to treat anything premodern with suspicion, oral traditions are denigrated as being products of the wild imaginations of ignorant prescientific people, imaginations that might even had been corrupted further through oral transmission as in a game of broken telephone. Thus, while premoderns treat oral traditions as real history, moderns treat them as myths, which are defined as coherent narratives that ritually enact “past and future events” (7). These early myths then evolved into the early Egyptian religion of early man (8), and thus into every ancient religion on earth by the time of the “Axial Age.”
Without oral traditions, those studying pre-history have to study human artifacts, use radiometric dating, and make guesses to hypothesize about what they think had happened in humanity’s distant past. Assuming the truth about human evolution, they hypothesize the steps primeval humans have to take to go from point A (big brain ape-like creatures) to point B (humans at the flashpoint of literacy). Thus, primeval humans have to discover fire and cooking, form stable families and move towards monogamy, go from foragers to big game hunter-gatherers and then to farmers and pastoralists, develop language and the notion of abstract concepts, and develop religion. Since these were not present at point A but were present at point B, humans must have developed these concepts sometime or another in our primeval history.
Such thus is the approach taken by Harari in his discussion of the history of primeval humanity. Harari is careful in stating that much is unknown in any discussion of this period of human history, calling this period of “tens of thousands of years of history” the “curtain of silence” (p. 68). However, he speculates on the ways in which our supposed ancestors might have lived through those developments that must have occurred from point A to point B, using modern day examples of foraging societies such as the Aché as pointers to how our ancestors might have lived, while acknowledging the limitations of such comparisons (pp. 59-60). Elsewhere, ecological data were used to promote a speculative theory about the primeval human impact on the planet’s ecosystems (pp. 70-83), which may or may not be true but at best confuses correlation with causation.
Since written history began with cities and agriculture, while primeval humans supposedly were on Earth for much longer than that, the Agricultural Revolution must have taken place as the transition point between what we know of as “pre-history” and “history.” Harari has a decidedly negative view of the Agricultural Revolution, seeing it as being “history’s biggest fraud” (the title of chapter 5 on the topic), as he compares the supposedly egalitarian society of foraging life with the misery of the lower class in farming life (9). The key points I would like to note here are how indebted this view of history is to the story of human evolution, how Harari is not unbiased as he make values judgments on supposed historical events, and how Harari has a decidedly unrealistic view of forager society, treating the idyllic portrayal of the Aché as if most primeval forager societies were somewhat like them (p. 60). (10)
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7. See Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), xviii- xix, 32-3, especially page 33 where Bellah discusses what a true myth is.
8. Ibid., 240-1
9. In a really weird manner, Harari asserts that the Agricultural Revolution was a trap because growing more food leads to more children, and more children means everyone having a worse quality of life (pp. 98-9). But children do not suddenly and miraculously multiply just because more food is present. Human families will have children regardless of whether they are foragers or farmers. Rather, in order for foragers to get by on less food, some babies will have to die, because they would not have enough food to feed that many children. Is abortion and infanticide in order to survive really a better quality of life compared to having and exercising the option of having more children?
10. Despite Harari’s statement that some bands “may have been as hierarchical, tense and violent as the nastiest chimpanzee group, while others were as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a bunch of bonobos,” (p. 63), that he puts up the Aché as an example of how the primeval hunter-gatherers are like means that he perceives that most of the primeval hunter-gatherers were probably more like the Aché than the “nastiest chimpanzee group.”