Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Pdf Book Name: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Author: Yuval Noah Harari
Publisher: Signal Books
ISBN-10: 9780771038501
Year: 2014
Pages: 464
Language: English
File size: 13.52 MB
File format: PDF

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Pdf Book Description:

How did our species triumph in the struggle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to make towns and kingdoms? How can we come to think in gods, countries, and individual rights; to trust cash, novels, and legislation; and also to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? Back in Sapiens, Dr. Yuval Noah Harari crosses the whole of human history, in the very first people to walk the ground into the revolutionary and occasionally catastrophic discoveries of this Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, palaeontology, and economics, he also investigates how the currents of history have formed our individual societies, the plants and creatures around us and our characters. Have we become more joyful as history has unfolded? Could we free our behavior from the legacy of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to affect the course of the generations ahead?

Biologists classify organisms into species. Animals are said to belong to the same species if they tend to mate with each other, giving birth to fertile offspring. Horses and donkeys have a recent common ancestor and share many physical traits. But they show little sexual interest in one another. They will mate if induced to do so but their offspring, called mules, are sterile. Mutations in donkey DNA can therefore never cross over to horses, or vice versa. The two types of animals are consequently considered two distinct species, moving along separate evolutionary paths. By contrast, a bulldog and a spaniel may look very different, but they are members of the same species, sharing the same DNA pool. They will happily mate and their puppies will grow up to pair of with other dogs and produce more puppies. Species that evolved from a common ancestor are bunched together under the heading ‘genus’ (plural genera). Lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars are different species within the genus Panthera. Biologists label organisms with a two-part Latin name, genus followed by species. Lions, for example, are called Panthera leo, the species leo of the genus Panthera. Presumably, everyone reading this book is a Homo sapiens the species sapiens (wise) of the genus Homo (man).