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HARARI, Homo Sapiens WITHOUT Language
YUVAL NOAH HARARI — SAPIENS, A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND — 2011
The book was originally written in Hebrew and it was translated later on. That should imply some caution about what the real thinking of the author might be since Hebrew is a first articulation root language and English is a third articulation analytical frond language. The two languages are not compatible in many ways and translating one into the other is necessarily problematic.
This being said we can now deal with the book the way it appears in English.
The first remark is fundamental. Before even making this remark it is important to understand that phrase like “most … agree today that …” is a purely ideological and rhetorical means and it has absolutely no scientific value. It is not because the majority of mathematicians think this or that on a crucial and debated question that their opinion is true. All scientific progress always came from the ideas that challenged what most people in the concerned scientific field thought at the time. Copernic and Galileo Galilei would have had to invent nothing about the shape of the earth if the majority of people had thought it was round at the time. This discovery was a discovery because most people thought the earth was flat at the time. The majority was wrong. And such a majority rule is dangerous by principle, particularly in some political arenas.
My first remark is that the book starts the history of humanity at 70,000 years BCE. At this time all the migrations out of Africa have taken place and were practically finished. That enables the author NOT TO CONSIDER the at least 230,000 years of Homo Sapiens’s emergence before this date 70,000 BCE, and this emergence took place in Africa and ONLY Africa. This is from my point of view a grave and sinister shortcoming that is practically racist, de facto segregative against Africans. The author can then forget to tell us we are all originally black and in the book this black exclusion is systematic. Later on, when he speaks of the agricultural revolution, he rightly connects this agriculture with cereals, rice, wheat, corn, and some other like rye, oats, etc. And here again, since this agriculture that emerged in Africa too is not based on cereals (except in Egypt which is not…
