Recently I was gifted the book "Sapiens a brief history of humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari. I have started reading the book and find it extremely interesting. So much so that I cannot delay writing my comments on it untill I have finished it. I hope to write my review in instalments as my reading progresses.
1. Begining:
The book starts with an interesting premis all books are story books. This takes the reader's mind to a state of openness that exists in the childhood when all book are story books. The history of humankind is in fact the history of the evolution of human thought. This is so because human beings can not be perceived as such unless the species has qualities of speech and cognition.
The biblical religions namely Jewism, Christianity and Islam all portray adam the first human being as a groomed, educated and talking person who was created to be God's viceroy on earth. However it seems that when God realised that Adam would not last even a hundred years on earth, Eve had to be created to perpetuate the viceroyalty, although the key to procreation remained with Adam.
However, Harari prefers to stick to the story developed by anthropologists and assumes human beings as having evolved from apes some where in East Africa. Perhaps it is religious influence that has persuaded anthropologists to believe that humankind originated at a single location and spread all over earth to Islands and continents that are oceans apart. Even Harari has named one of the chapters of his book Sapiens "The Tree of Knowledge,” most probably referring to the fruit that brought the downfall of Adam paradise as stated in Genesis in Torah or Old Testament. Nonetheless, the idea of knowledge growing on trees is quite fascinating.
Now, being a bit more scientific, if we regard genetic evolution as a time dependent mathematical function similar to radioactive decay or crystallization then it is possible that human colonies could have emerged in different parts of the world at roughly the same time with slightly different features.
