An Animal of No Significance

Harari opens on a cosmic scale to make a humbling point: for almost all of its existence, Homo sapiens was an animal of no particular importance. About 13.8 billion years ago matter and energy appeared, the domain of physics; some 300,000 years later atoms and molecules formed, the domain of chemistry; around 3.8 billion years ago organisms emerged, the domain of biology. History, in Harari's telling, begins only about 70,000 years ago, when a strange new species began doing things nothing in physics, chemistry, or biology fully predicts.

Even then, sapiens arrived late and ordinary. Humans were not alone: the planet was home to several species of the genus Homo — Neanderthals in Europe, erectus in Asia, the tiny floresiensis, and others — each adapted to its own environment. We are used to thinking of ourselves as the only humans, but for most of prehistory being human meant belonging to one of many coexisting human species, not a single lineage destined for greatness.

For roughly two million years, humans sat squarely in the middle of the food chain. They gathered plants, scavenged carcasses, hunted small game, and were themselves hunted by larger predators. Their one unusual trait — an enormous brain — was metabolically expensive, consuming a large share of the body's energy while offering, for a very long time, no obvious payoff in dominance.

Harari draws out the costs written into human biology. Walking upright freed the hands but narrowed the hips, making childbirth dangerous and pushing humans to give birth to helpless, premature infants. That long, vulnerable childhood demanded intense social cooperation to raise the young — a pressure that helped forge the tight, communicative bands that would later matter enormously.

The taming of fire, perhaps 300,000 years ago, was the first hint of what was coming. Fire gave a weak animal a reliable source of power: protection, warmth, and above all cooking, which made food easier to digest and freed up energy that could feed the growing brain. Yet even with fire, sapiens remained one significant animal among many, not the ruler of the planet.

The deeper theme Harari sets up is the strangeness of our recent ascent. Most creatures at the top of the food chain rose there gradually, over millions of years, giving ecosystems time to adjust. Sapiens jumped from the middle to the top almost overnight in evolutionary terms — a leap so fast that neither the ecosystem nor our own psychology had time to adapt. Much of the fear and recklessness that mark human history, he suggests, traces back to being an insecure, recently promoted animal that still, in some deep sense, remembers being prey.