A cut-down summary of Sapiens covering the major points.
Sapiens [Tenth Anniversary Edition]: A Brief History of Humankind
New York Times Readers’ Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st CenturyThe tenth anniversary edition of the internationally bestselling phenomenon that cemented Yuval Noah Harari as one of the most prominent historians of our time—featuring a new afterword from the author.One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?In Sapiens, Professor Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical—and sometimes devastating—breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, paleontology, and economics, and incorporating full-color illustrations throughout the text, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Can we ever free our behavior from the legacy of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?Bold, wide-ranging, and provocative, Sapiens integrates history and science to challenge everything we thought we knew about being human: our thoughts, our actions, our heritage...and our future.
Links between the discovery of primates and anatomical comparisons with humans, the chain of being, our place in nature, and racism
- For more than a millennium humans knew more about the internal anatomy of a single monkey species than about that of their own bodies, because Galen used monkeys to infer human anatomy, in line wit...
Anthropeum
A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artifact was made. See how you rank.
Platform Stats — blogs.social
Discover and follow blogs across Bluesky, Mastodon, RSS, and the open social web.
The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosperHumans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals? This book shows that the secret of our success lies not in our innate intelligence, but in our collective brains—on the ability of human groups to socially interconnect and learn from one another over generations.Drawing insights from lost European explorers, clever chimpanzees, mobile hunter-gatherers, neuroscientific findings, ancient bones, and the human genome, Joseph Henrich demonstrates how our collective brains have propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. Our early capacities for learning from others produced many cultural innovations, such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons, which in turn drove the expansion of our brains and altered our physiology, anatomy, and psychology in crucial ways. Later on, some collective brains generated and recombined powerful concepts, such as the lever, wheel, screw, and writing, while also creating the institutions that continue to alter our motivations and perceptions. Henrich shows how our genetics and biology are inextricably interwoven with cultural evolution, and how culture-gene interactions launched our species on an extraordinary evolutionary trajectory.Tracking clues from our ancient past to the present, The Secret of Our Success explores how the evolution of both our cultural and social natures produce a collective intelligence that explains both our species' immense success and the origins of human uniqueness.
They have to be able to talk about us without us - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild
If humans will eventually spread out across the galaxy, then we are among the earliest living beings, with remarkable opportunities to shape the future
NoRobots.blog
100% Human-produced content. No Language Models were used in the production of this weblog.
WWW-Talk Apr-Jun 1993: group annotation server guinea pigs?
Opinion | We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment (Published 2017)
What best distinguishes human beings from other animals is our foresight, as scientists are just beginning to recognize.
How Markdown took over the world - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
A great little thread for distinct social graphs. @sprk.so will definitely be taking ‘hints’ from existing ones (like Bsky), already in the works.
Blaine
Definitely room for UX exploration, but no-ones has a single social graph. It's the biggest lie zuck ever told. 😅 There's a lot of writing on this, but a decent place to start is Erving Goffman; we wear different masks and perform to different audiences depending on social context.
