Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six species of human shared the planet. Today there is only one. In Sapiens, historian Yuval Noah Harari traces the story of our species from insignificant African apes to rulers of the world, arguing that three great revolutions shaped that ascent: the Cognitive Revolution that let us imagine and cooperate at scale, the Agricultural Revolution that tied us to land and grain, and the Scientific Revolution that armed us with unprecedented power.

Ranging across biology, economics, religion, and politics, Harari asks how Homo sapiens came to believe in gods, nations, money, and human rights — shared fictions that let millions of strangers work together — and what those fictions have cost us and the rest of the living world.

Provocative and sweeping, Sapiens is a big-picture history of humankind that also turns its questions on the present: now that we are close to overcoming the constraints of biology, what kind of future do we actually want?