Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction.

Time and again people have created order in their societies by classifying the population into imagined categories, such as superiors, commoners and slaves; whites and blacks; patricians and plebeians; Brahmins and Shudras; or rich and poor.

tribe believe that holy spirits live on the moon. I

By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.1

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

and hunted bison and mammoth. Notwithstanding the popular image of ‘man the hunter’, gathering was Sapiens’ main activity, and it provided most of their calories, as well as raw materials such as flint, wood and bamboo. Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well. To survive, they needed a detailed mental

Jacob Bernoulli’s Law of Large Numbers. Bernoulli had codified the principle that while it might be difficult to predict with certainty a single event, such as the death of a particular person, it was possible to predict with great accuracy the average outcome of many similar events.

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much

Secondly, humans die, and their brains die with them. Any information stored in a brain will be erased in less than a century.