I would like to put in a plug for Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. My intro to this author wasn't good. I listened to him try to be big brain about the pandemic and wasn't impressed, but then I picked up Sapiens. Now I know why people like Bill Gates and Barack Obama recommend him.
Trust your first impression of him trying to big brain about the pandemic, that's his whole shtik - compelling blather. Probably you're not a human population history researcher? That would make it very hard to see through his sensationalism
> Probably you're not a human population history researcher
No I am a very interested amateur. I just learned about Denisovans. Sapiens is a good story and I assumed he was simplifying. I plan to go deeper on this subject.
From my perspective (population genetics), I'd recommend anything by Adam Rutherford (Humanimal, The Book of Humans) . He hits similar topics, but with the citations to back his assertions and a minimum of editorialization.
I don't think Yuval is trying to "big brain", just rationalize what the world will become under the need of "emergency" like here, Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus[1], he's not shown interest in "speculating" the origins of the virus or how the pandemic begins so compare this trait to some other "big brain" out there
>Centralised monitoring and harsh punishments aren’t the only way to make people comply with beneficial guidelines. When people are told the scientific facts, and when people trust public authorities to tell them these facts, citizens can do the right thing even without a Big Brother watching over their shoulders. A self-motivated and well-informed population is usually far more powerful and effective than a policed, ignorant population.
Of all Harari's predictions, this one was the most depressing when we found out it was false.
"when people trust public authorities to tell them these facts" - There was a lot of mixed messaging from authorities going on in the first half of 2020, so I can understand why citizens are mistrustful (even though I may disagree with a lot of their conclusions).
Not a professional anthropologist or historian, but I do enjoy reading about it. You should be skeptical when authors/books make general claims about a large group of people. There are counterexamples, especially when writing about a long period of history, and books like these can often end up being Eurocentric.
Here are some good Reddit threads from r/AskHistorians and r/AskAnthropology, where professionals often visit, describing the flaws in Sapiens. The comments have specific examples, if you follow the links.
> Beyond that, Harari seems generally unconcerned with differentiating the experience of Western Europe from the experience of "us"- the species. This is why I can't really recommend the book, because this so thoroughly undermines his apparent goal. The very name of the book tells us that it will be a history of all of us and how we became so dominant in the world. And yet, so much of the book focuses on things that only a portion of H. sapiens ever developed, but talks about them as if they were natural developments for our species as a whole.
So, after reading those threads, my first impression is this is an ideological disagreement, but not that Harari is actually wrong in his analysis.
Ok, so I'll start with some observations on the comments themselves, and will continue to explain what really needs to be addressed in order for me to understand things better. The comments seem to dislike that this book is about the whole of humanity, written in a short book, so I would expect a simple counter to this, but I see people not having read the book in full:
QUOTE "But again, since I've yet to personally read the book rather than get second-hand info about it"
QUOTE "I've tried to read it twice and not got very far."
QUOTE "I've seen some water cooler chat about the book, but I don't personally know anyone that has read the book - like myself"
Regardless, the first link seems to contain better info on why it's wrong, with specific detailed counters, it's just that those details could still be off, but the premise could still be right... however this "benefit of the doubt", let's call it, is only given to OTHER books just not Sapiens:
QUOTE "This is why a book like 1491 has been so much more warmly received. One can undoubtedly find dozens of factual errors within. But instead of mirroring a popular inquiry born out of popular ignorance ("Why were the Americas so decisively conquered?"), it recognizes that ignorance as a problem to be solved."
First, "warmly received" is useless here, and second we can start to see the root of the disagreement... it has to do with a specific perspective of the world, and anyone going against that perspective is wrong (but of course, the reasons won't be made clear -- instead attacking mistakes, character, and credentials).
The following quote shines a light on this a bit more.
QUOTE "Some would argue that language is purely abstract- that the act of calling something a rock is what creates the rock. As much as the 'rock' exists as a physical object with observable properties, there is no natural boundary between 'rock' and 'pebble' and 'sand.' "
Ah... isn't this interesting? This is all philosophy, and I would even label Sapiens as philosophy to a great extent. These are all theories that can only be reasoned about, and thus we enter Epistemology and Ontology, and we're in a completely different territory than History. We're trying to understand ourselves in History, this is not an event, or a fact.
In conclusion, I would like a hard counter to his simple premise, which is an answer to the question, why are humans so different than the rest of the animal kingdom? (TED talk summarizes it nicely), and also, I would like to point out that the criticisms are not self-aware that they're arguing philosophical matters and instead are pretending they are countering hard historical facts, and dismissing the book on that basis.
TL;DR: why are humans so different than animals, and why is that a historical conversation, when it's really philosophy, and ultimately Harari made it simple, so there should be no need to argue around it if he's wrong in his premise.
Sapiens is a big "picture human history" book, which is a genre which is always going to have a number of weaknesses due to the problems of trying to squelch all of human history into a single readable book with a clear thesis. The quote about the French Revolution is indeed pretty bad as a literal description of what happened during the revolution, (though I understand what he is getting at when he says it.) However, I don't think that this analysis is quite fair to Harari.
His main criticism is of Harari's "shared fiction" concept and it seems to me that he misses the point of the concept. Harari is pointing out a category of thing that really does exist in the real world, but only exists because people agree on some level to recognize its existence. Corporations (to use Harari's example) are indeed real, but they exist only because people agree they exist. If people refused to believe in IBM, for example, it would cease to exist.
I don't know if Harari is correct that this ability to embrace social realities actually constitutes a "cognitive revolution" that allowed homo sapiens to surpass other human species in a dramatic way, but I do think that it is certainly different from our ability create a word for "rock" and thereby reify rocks into existence. There's a difference between being able to create arbitrary categories for material objects in the world and being able to recognize a new category of thing through shared acceptance. I don't think that the latter is simply a consequence of our ability to use language.
Also, it's important to note that that critique is being offered by a historian but the core of the critique is philosophical (or maybe linguistic) not historical. I think the best criticism I've seen of Sapiens is that the author is a historian trying to write anthropology, but this critique of that anthropology book is also by an historian so it has the same weakness.
> Agriculture transformed humanity’s relationship to nature, giving us dominion. Thanks to agriculture, ecologists say, we now suck up half or more of the primary productivity of the planet.
Bad idea, Mr. Harari says. Agriculture increased the amount of available food, yet the result of prosperity was not happiness but “population explosions and pampered elites.” Farmers worked harder than foragers and had a worse diet and poorer health. The surplus went to the privileged few, who used it to oppress. “The Agricultural Revolution,” Mr. Harari says, “was history’s biggest fraud.” Really? Always and everywhere? Were the Iroquois, who farmed, so much worse off than the foraging Abitibis and Témiscamingues to their north? Discussing the long dispute among anthropologists about whether the earliest hunter-gatherers lived in “peaceful paradises” or were “exceptionally cruel and violent,” Mr. Harari maintains that the question can’t be answered, because the meager data from archaeology and anthropology aren’t enough to pierce “the curtain of silence” that enshrouds our remotest ancestors. Surely the same logic applies to comparing their well-being to that of the earliest farmers.
> “The Romans, Mongols, and Aztecs voraciously conquered new lands in search of power and wealth—not of knowledge. In contrast, European imperialists set out to distant shores in the hope of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories.”
> “Unfortunately,” he says, “the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of.”
Agreed. There wasn't one thing in Sapiens that I hadn't already encountered in another book (sometimes written a decade or more earlier).
I would recommend The Great Human Diasporas by Cavalli-Sforza, Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins, and Against the Gods by Bernstein to tickle similar parts of your brain.
>It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously. So we should not judge Sapiens as a serious contribution to knowledge but as 'infotainment', a publishing event to titillate its readers by a wild intellectual ride across the landscape of history, dotted with sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions about human destiny. By these criteria it is a most successful book.
-C. R. Hallpike
For what it's worth, foxes are much closer to dogs and wolves (and other canids) than hyenas are to cats.
The relationship between cats and hyenas is more like the relationship between dogs and bears, raccoons, or seals, which are classified as caniforms but are obviously distinct from actual canid species.
Both felines and hyenas are of the Feliformia order and they share a common ancestor but that doesn't mean hyenas are felines. Hyenas are more closely related to felines than dogs, but hyenas are not felines.
Yeah, that's a bizarre headline. I'm not sure it's wrong, but it's quite strange.
Edit: I'm not sure actually right either. It was not the act of eating that transported the bodies; rather the bodies were brought there so they could be eaten.
"Hyenas dragged 9 Neanderthals to a cave to eat them."
Both are fine, if you remove the comma in your example, but the one used in the article puts the focus on "eating" first. It's also more interesting to read: "By eating them..." (who ate who or what?) ..."hyenas gathered neanderthal skeletons" (oh good, interesting archeology, I'll check it out) etc.
As 'drops says, your versions is correct if you drop the comma. You can move parts of a sentence around from the "normal" order with commas:
Normal: Hyenas gathered 9 Neanderthal skeletons by eating them.
Move with comma: By eating them, hyenas gathered 9 Neanderthal skeletons.
Normal: I think it will rain later.
Move with comma: It will rain later, I think.
Your statement and the headline are grammatically equivalent (minus your comma). However, the sentence is strange because “by” implies a causation that is not supported between the supposed cause and the supposed effect. The Neanderthals were brought to the cave to be eaten; it’s almost but not quite backwards.
My guess is what the author means is, “By preying upon...” which would be correct because dragging them to the cave is part of their predation. “By eating them” implies they were eaten and then, because of the eating, wound up in the cave (say through defecation or inside the stomachs of dead hyenas).
"Neanderthal skeletal remains found in hyena lair". It's simple and straightforward. Explain the why in the article. Don't try to explain everything in a headline.
Yea, I’m not sure what the commenter means by implying not formidable and being the size of dogs. Modern hyenas are not small by any means and are the size of the largest dog breeds and are much stronger.
A modern hyena could trivially kill a human all by itself (hyenas have literally bone crushing jaws), which doesn’t even consider a pack of them.
I actually found this video where a hyena basically took what it wanted from a leopard before the leopard took its prey up a tree. (Warning: predators with dead prey.)
I love how the leopard looks over its shoulder with a look that I anthropomorphized as an incredulous gaze, similar to the one my cat gives as my border collie runs around the house. "Can you believe this?"
> I actually found this video where a hyena basically took what it wanted from a leopard before the leopard took its prey up a tree. (Warning: predators with dead prey.)
> https://youtu.be/cYzogF9IVLI
The two animals were surprisingly "civil" given the amount of damage they could have inflicted on each other...
I guess it's that predators budget their energy usage and evaluate the risks of confrontations. A wound would probably lead to infection and death, and expending energy fighting another big predator when you could spend that energy hunting instead...
I did not say nor imply "not formidable". I said and meant "quite a bit more formidable". But, to your point: the overwhelming majority of humans killed by hyenas are killed by packs of hyenas, not individuals, and there is a reason for this. I definitely dispute the idea that a single modern hyena can kill a human "trivially".
I'm not trying to make a moral argument, I'm just saying that those that fall prey to hyenas suffer much more than if they had fallen prey to a number of other predators that tend to kill swiftly before eating (feline predators and snakes for example kill quickly; many birds also tend to kill on the first strike).
Hyenas don't bother killing, they just eat, and tend to start from non-vital organs, of all places, which is quite different from what most predators would do.
I'm no wildlife biologist but it seems that hyenas are not big enough to take down some of their prey by the neck (without high risk of injury to themselves, where a broken leg probably means certain death), so the evolutionary adaptation is to go for the soft underbelly. Undoubtedly the prey animals do feel pain and suffer.
> Hyenas are super cruel. It seems from many videos they take down beasts by biting off balls.
Chimps rip balls off, gouge eyes, etc. Snakes use venom. Some plants drown and dissolve their prey in acid. It's not a matter of "cruelty", it's a matter of the tools available to these animals.
> In yet other cases they just start eating the animal from before it's even dead.
There are animals/plants that eat their prey whole and dissolve them in acid. Ultimate goal of these animals is to eat, not to kill. What do you want the hyena to do?
> Very different from many cat family predators that usually kill their prey first.
Not because of some moral code. Because they don't want the prey attracting other predators. There are videos of cats eating live prey when it is convenient for them. A particular gruesome one is a pride of lions eating a live baby elephant.
There is no "cruelty" in nature. Only efficiency. These animals want to eat and do what they can with what they have.
Is it cruel for wasps to parasitically control insects, bugs, etc and lay eggs in them so that their eggs/larvae could feed on these hosts? A hyena is no more "cruel" than an earthquake is "cruel" for unleashing a tsunami that drowns thousands of people.
Relax, I wasn't trying to make a moral argument. I was just saying that the suffering endured by those animals from a hyena seems much more than if they had been caught by many other similar-sized predators that tend to kill quickly.
It's also interesting that hyenas don't care to kill first, because another big reason to kill your prey as quickly as possible is that it stops fighting, and has less potential to injure you. If the hyena had gone for the neck first the animal would be down quickly and the hyena could eat in peace.
As a member of the canine family myself[0], I would like to point out that there are a few dog breeds that can at least come close to 225 lbs. [1]
That said, yikes! Regular hyenas are scary, but add another 100 lbs on one, and we're talking nightmare fuel.
IIRC, modern hyenas tend not to attack people, generally. The way they mention the skeletons having been found at different sedimentary layers makes me think these guys are similar in that respect, which kinda dampens the whole "nightmare fuel" thing. At least, I hope so.
---
[0]: Not actually a novelty account. I just thought it was a funny username.
62 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadNo I am a very interested amateur. I just learned about Denisovans. Sapiens is a good story and I assumed he was simplifying. I plan to go deeper on this subject.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcc...
Of all Harari's predictions, this one was the most depressing when we found out it was false.
"when people trust public authorities to tell them these facts" - There was a lot of mixed messaging from authorities going on in the first half of 2020, so I can understand why citizens are mistrustful (even though I may disagree with a lot of their conclusions).
Here are some good Reddit threads from r/AskHistorians and r/AskAnthropology, where professionals often visit, describing the flaws in Sapiens. The comments have specific examples, if you follow the links.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/igfkv5/is_sa...
> Beyond that, Harari seems generally unconcerned with differentiating the experience of Western Europe from the experience of "us"- the species. This is why I can't really recommend the book, because this so thoroughly undermines his apparent goal. The very name of the book tells us that it will be a history of all of us and how we became so dominant in the world. And yet, so much of the book focuses on things that only a portion of H. sapiens ever developed, but talks about them as if they were natural developments for our species as a whole.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/i7v3ab/wha...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/71mayz/tho...
Ok, so I'll start with some observations on the comments themselves, and will continue to explain what really needs to be addressed in order for me to understand things better. The comments seem to dislike that this book is about the whole of humanity, written in a short book, so I would expect a simple counter to this, but I see people not having read the book in full:
QUOTE "But again, since I've yet to personally read the book rather than get second-hand info about it"
QUOTE "I've tried to read it twice and not got very far."
QUOTE "I've seen some water cooler chat about the book, but I don't personally know anyone that has read the book - like myself"
Regardless, the first link seems to contain better info on why it's wrong, with specific detailed counters, it's just that those details could still be off, but the premise could still be right... however this "benefit of the doubt", let's call it, is only given to OTHER books just not Sapiens:
QUOTE "This is why a book like 1491 has been so much more warmly received. One can undoubtedly find dozens of factual errors within. But instead of mirroring a popular inquiry born out of popular ignorance ("Why were the Americas so decisively conquered?"), it recognizes that ignorance as a problem to be solved."
First, "warmly received" is useless here, and second we can start to see the root of the disagreement... it has to do with a specific perspective of the world, and anyone going against that perspective is wrong (but of course, the reasons won't be made clear -- instead attacking mistakes, character, and credentials).
The following quote shines a light on this a bit more.
QUOTE "Some would argue that language is purely abstract- that the act of calling something a rock is what creates the rock. As much as the 'rock' exists as a physical object with observable properties, there is no natural boundary between 'rock' and 'pebble' and 'sand.' "
Ah... isn't this interesting? This is all philosophy, and I would even label Sapiens as philosophy to a great extent. These are all theories that can only be reasoned about, and thus we enter Epistemology and Ontology, and we're in a completely different territory than History. We're trying to understand ourselves in History, this is not an event, or a fact.
In conclusion, I would like a hard counter to his simple premise, which is an answer to the question, why are humans so different than the rest of the animal kingdom? (TED talk summarizes it nicely), and also, I would like to point out that the criticisms are not self-aware that they're arguing philosophical matters and instead are pretending they are countering hard historical facts, and dismissing the book on that basis.
TL;DR: why are humans so different than animals, and why is that a historical conversation, when it's really philosophy, and ultimately Harari made it simple, so there should be no need to argue around it if he's wrong in his premise.
His main criticism is of Harari's "shared fiction" concept and it seems to me that he misses the point of the concept. Harari is pointing out a category of thing that really does exist in the real world, but only exists because people agree on some level to recognize its existence. Corporations (to use Harari's example) are indeed real, but they exist only because people agree they exist. If people refused to believe in IBM, for example, it would cease to exist.
I don't know if Harari is correct that this ability to embrace social realities actually constitutes a "cognitive revolution" that allowed homo sapiens to surpass other human species in a dramatic way, but I do think that it is certainly different from our ability create a word for "rock" and thereby reify rocks into existence. There's a difference between being able to create arbitrary categories for material objects in the world and being able to recognize a new category of thing through shared acceptance. I don't think that the latter is simply a consequence of our ability to use language.
Also, it's important to note that that critique is being offered by a historian but the core of the critique is philosophical (or maybe linguistic) not historical. I think the best criticism I've seen of Sapiens is that the author is a historian trying to write anthropology, but this critique of that anthropology book is also by an historian so it has the same weakness.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-sapiens-a-brief-his...
> Agriculture transformed humanity’s relationship to nature, giving us dominion. Thanks to agriculture, ecologists say, we now suck up half or more of the primary productivity of the planet. Bad idea, Mr. Harari says. Agriculture increased the amount of available food, yet the result of prosperity was not happiness but “population explosions and pampered elites.” Farmers worked harder than foragers and had a worse diet and poorer health. The surplus went to the privileged few, who used it to oppress. “The Agricultural Revolution,” Mr. Harari says, “was history’s biggest fraud.” Really? Always and everywhere? Were the Iroquois, who farmed, so much worse off than the foraging Abitibis and Témiscamingues to their north? Discussing the long dispute among anthropologists about whether the earliest hunter-gatherers lived in “peaceful paradises” or were “exceptionally cruel and violent,” Mr. Harari maintains that the question can’t be answered, because the meager data from archaeology and anthropology aren’t enough to pierce “the curtain of silence” that enshrouds our remotest ancestors. Surely the same logic applies to comparing their well-being to that of the earliest farmers.
> “The Romans, Mongols, and Aztecs voraciously conquered new lands in search of power and wealth—not of knowledge. In contrast, European imperialists set out to distant shores in the hope of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories.”
> “Unfortunately,” he says, “the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of.”
I would recommend The Great Human Diasporas by Cavalli-Sforza, Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins, and Against the Gods by Bernstein to tickle similar parts of your brain.
>It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously. So we should not judge Sapiens as a serious contribution to knowledge but as 'infotainment', a publishing event to titillate its readers by a wild intellectual ride across the landscape of history, dotted with sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions about human destiny. By these criteria it is a most successful book. -C. R. Hallpike
Huh, I didn't know that, I'd always seen hyenas as cousins of dogs/wolves.
The relationship between cats and hyenas is more like the relationship between dogs and bears, raccoons, or seals, which are classified as caniforms but are obviously distinct from actual canid species.
Felines are part of the Felidae family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felidae
Hyenas are part of the Hyaenidae family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyena
Both felines and hyenas are of the Feliformia order and they share a common ancestor but that doesn't mean hyenas are felines. Hyenas are more closely related to felines than dogs, but hyenas are not felines.
Not a native English speaker, but I’d thought English grammar would require to put it: Hyenas gathered 9 Neanderthal skeletons, by eating them.
Edit: I'm not sure actually right either. It was not the act of eating that transported the bodies; rather the bodies were brought there so they could be eaten.
"Hyenas dragged 9 Neanderthals to a cave to eat them."
>Hyenas gathered, by eating them, 9 Neanderthal skeletons.
Which is even more awkward in actual use, but does make obvious the biggest problem with the sentence: you don't gather things by eating them.
My guess is what the author means is, “By preying upon...” which would be correct because dragging them to the cave is part of their predation. “By eating them” implies they were eaten and then, because of the eating, wound up in the cave (say through defecation or inside the stomachs of dead hyenas).
"Neanderthal skeletal remains found in hyena lair". It's simple and straightforward. Explain the why in the article. Don't try to explain everything in a headline.
> The European cave hyena was much larger than its modern African cousin, having been estimated to weigh 102 kg (225 lb)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_hyena
So, sized more like a jaguar than a dog.
https://alumni.duke.edu/sites/default/files/dm-main-images/p...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ETcFOq3UcAEjG8Y?format=png&name=...
A modern hyena could trivially kill a human all by itself (hyenas have literally bone crushing jaws), which doesn’t even consider a pack of them.
I actually found this video where a hyena basically took what it wanted from a leopard before the leopard took its prey up a tree. (Warning: predators with dead prey.)
https://youtu.be/cYzogF9IVLI
The two animals were surprisingly "civil" given the amount of damage they could have inflicted on each other...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9kmX0kFq2M (CW: graphic)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2k9LFb-VtY (CW: graphic)
In yet other cases they just start eating the animal from before it's even dead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0kNW4KQCoY (CW: graphic)
Very different from many cat family predators that usually kill their prey first.
this bird looks super cute, but...
https://www.audubon.org/news/shrikes-have-absolutely-brutal-...
Hyenas don't bother killing, they just eat, and tend to start from non-vital organs, of all places, which is quite different from what most predators would do.
Chimps rip balls off, gouge eyes, etc. Snakes use venom. Some plants drown and dissolve their prey in acid. It's not a matter of "cruelty", it's a matter of the tools available to these animals.
> In yet other cases they just start eating the animal from before it's even dead.
There are animals/plants that eat their prey whole and dissolve them in acid. Ultimate goal of these animals is to eat, not to kill. What do you want the hyena to do?
> Very different from many cat family predators that usually kill their prey first.
Not because of some moral code. Because they don't want the prey attracting other predators. There are videos of cats eating live prey when it is convenient for them. A particular gruesome one is a pride of lions eating a live baby elephant.
There is no "cruelty" in nature. Only efficiency. These animals want to eat and do what they can with what they have.
Is it cruel for wasps to parasitically control insects, bugs, etc and lay eggs in them so that their eggs/larvae could feed on these hosts? A hyena is no more "cruel" than an earthquake is "cruel" for unleashing a tsunami that drowns thousands of people.
Only humans are cruel. Nature is simply nature.
It's also interesting that hyenas don't care to kill first, because another big reason to kill your prey as quickly as possible is that it stops fighting, and has less potential to injure you. If the hyena had gone for the neck first the animal would be down quickly and the hyena could eat in peace.
That said, yikes! Regular hyenas are scary, but add another 100 lbs on one, and we're talking nightmare fuel.
IIRC, modern hyenas tend not to attack people, generally. The way they mention the skeletons having been found at different sedimentary layers makes me think these guys are similar in that respect, which kinda dampens the whole "nightmare fuel" thing. At least, I hope so.
---
[0]: Not actually a novelty account. I just thought it was a funny username.
[1]: https://topdogtips.com/worlds-largest-dog-breeds/
Aurochs were wild cows and bulls and definitely not horses.
"rhinoceroses, wild horses, an extinct wild bovine called aurochs, and people."