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Comment by Kluny | Hacker News Reader

I read Sapiens by Yuval Harari this year. It was long and fascinating, incredibly well researched, and easy enough for "light reading" that I had time for between writing research papers. A couple things that stuck with me were stories of giant land mammals that used to exist, many more than I realized, alongside humans. Wherever humans colonized, the large mammals were killed off soon after. This happened in Australia, China, and Europe, and long before the days of colonization. Another was the idea that humans have been cultivated by wheat, rather than the other way around, based on the observation that our relationship with wheat is more beneficial for the plant than for ourselves.

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I read Sapiens and its companion a few years ago.

This year I read Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity' by David Graeber and David Wengrow [0]. And found it much more nuanced, interesting and believable. Harari's narrative is just too slick.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29316008

The slickness is part of the appeal. I agree that he gets some of the details slightly wrong: the part about serotonin and depression sticks out. But at the same time, I'd rather have a slightly wrong and profoundly enjoyable book than one that's a slog to get through but gets more of the details right. I think Sapiens strikes a good balance.

Not a fan of Harari’s pop science books. Lots of theories and opinion presented as fact.

Serious question and would love to better my understanding : why do you say so? Any sources?

David Graeber says something about this in “The Dawn Of Everything”.

I’d suggest reading both books. One for the scaffolding and the other for color.

https://www.writemypapers.org/examples-and-samples/5-errors-...

There are some really questionable claims from both an anthropological and political perspective.

John Sexton's summary mirrors my own opinion:

> The book is fundamentally unserious and undeserving of the wide acclaim and attention it has been receiving. But it is worth considering the book’s blind spots and flaws — the better to understand the weaknesses of the genre and the intellectual temptations of our age. [0]

[0] https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/a-reductionist-h...

Intellectual temptations is our contemporary desire for condensed information from a single source.

Thank you for sharing a counterpoint. IMO this act of skepticism is the most important trait of the HN culture.

That being said, I read through the counterpoint article and found it pretty hollow. In fact it seems to strengthen my belief that Sapiens is a valuable book. I kept expecting the author to point out where Harari’s assertions were wrong, but each section more or less boiled down to Harari is either not funny or not clever. The author even contradicts his article’s own thesis partway through:

“Nonetheless, his version of human history involves moral judgments that suggest he is not so thoroughly reductionist, or as cynical about the human condition, as he appears to be at first glance.“

+1 for Harari

Seconded.

I received this book as a gift earlier this year and I thought it might be one of the most incredible books I've ever encountered.

What I liked about it is how it paints everything in very broad strokes so that you get to see humanity's place in the big picture.

It did have the side effect of leaving me very cynical afterwards, though. I'd think to myself "We're all apes"; All those accomplishments I'm so proud of are rather silly, and had things turned out slightly differently we'd still be hanging around under trees and scared of predators.

It also had the side effect of getting me to go play Far Cry Primal afterwards, just to get a little taste of what our ancestors might've experienced.

These books are fun, but should be taken with some skepticism.

This particular story with large mammals is a good example. The assumed causality does not hold closer scrutiny. Climate was also changing into something that works better for humans, and into worse for large mammals. There were many things at play. Humans may had or may not have had a role. However, it is very unlikely that humans had a defining role.

Good read nevertheless! Changed my mind how I view humans as mammals, and made me dig deeper into the topic.

The fact that the first human skeletons in isolated areas (Australia, North America, Cuba) almost always coincide with the last ones of large mammals is troubling though… well explained in the book.

I find it hard to believe that it was the climate that killed all the large mammals worldwide in a span of tens of thousands of years. But I'm open to having my mind changed.

It is one of the hypotheses. It seems very likely that there were multiple factors at play in the late pleistoscene extinction. A quick search with that topic will provide you with materials. Hunting is a common hypothesis, but it is impossible to prove the causality, and world is usually not that simple. Also, prehistoric human consumption of plant food has most likely been underestimated, as the plant remain fossils have not been able to remain in such climate. Recent dental calculus has shown that humans and their fellow neanderthals ate more plants than it has been originally estimated.

I don't claim to be an expert, but Harari is an excellent story teller. That narrative fits really well with his story.

You inspired me to read the Wikipedia article, which paints a pretty damning picture. It is not that far off from what is presented by Harari.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction

You might also like Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist (2009). I read that first and was struck by his many insights into how human society has prospered by collaboration and exchange. Reading Sapiens after that book gave me the feeling of reading a somewhat watered-down and much more pessimistic take on the same millenia-long story. On the topic of wheat for eaxmple Ridley, who is originally a biologist, tells it as how humans created wheat for our own benefit - modern wheat simply does not exist as a wild plant. (Have you ever seen a wheat weed?)

What stuck with me is how we basically discover that we could work with physics (he has a story that goes something like this: "We had discovered that energy can produce force way before we had trains, when we cook the bowl seemed to move on its own."

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