Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Next Book Group choice (by BB) is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (2011).

• Guardian review
• Goodreads reviews

Many  of the more critical of the Goodreads reviews say Part 1 is ok and it goes downhill and ever more fanciful from there.

My favourite book on evolutionary anthropology is The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan (1972), which promotes the aquatic ape hypothesis and satirizes the 'Tarzanist' myth promoted in The Naked Ape, a hugely popular 1970s book by Desmond Morris.

While the aquatic ape hypothesis seems to have lost credibility (I don't know why), the 'Tarzanist' myth seems to be alive and well in Sapiens. Here (in another Guardian review) is a typical summary of the latter, which is also known as the"savannah theory".

... humans became human by learning to hunt. Our ancestors walked upright in order to carry weapons, spoke to facilitate cooperation over long distances, lost most of their body hair to help cool down during the hot days of the Pleistocene, and ultimately broke into family units where the women stayed at home gathering roots and protecting the young, while the strapping, competitive men brought back the protein necessary to sustain their new lifestyles.

Back to Sapiens, I find that, judging by the first ‘fact’ in the book, it lacks credibility. In the Timeline and in Chapter 1, the first stated fact is that the universe is about 13.5 billion years old. In A Brief History of Time, on the other hand, Stephen Hawking is far more circumspect in saying it is 10 to 20 billion years old. I wonder why Harari chooses to be so specific about something that has no bearing on his topic. (Maybe he just goes along with convention?)

Other dubious statements include (p27 and p35) the ones about monkeys eating bananas, but monkeys do not eat bananas in the wild.

A comparable book, which I just stumbled upon and which I prefer, is A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright (reveiewed here at quillandquire). 

It includes the frightening story of Easter Island, which was once abundant with trees and natural assets, but where the first human settlers, tending to the cult of the moai, the 30-foot-high stone carvings of the gods, cut down all the trees and destroyed the island's fertility forever. They suffered from what anthropologists call an “ideological pathology,” and seemed unable and unwilling to avoid ecological disaster and population crash. Easter Island, by the way, is the metaphor at the heart of Clive Lord's blog.