There were six types of humans

I am currently reading the book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” a 2015 more-than-a-million-sold nonfiction book by Yuval Noah Harari.

 

The book delivers some surprising information. Delivered in no particular order, here are some facts which caught my attention: Neanderthals were “human,” not the “pre-human” I’ve always thought them to be. Neanderthals actually had larger brains than “homo sapiens,” the group modern people fall into. Along with that, Harari says there were as many as six types of humans for many centuries. One actually consisted of “dwarves,” humans who were isolated from others because they lived on an island with limited resources where smaller people were more likely to thrive. Homo floresiensis, according to archeological evidence, was less than four feet tall when fully grown.

 

Harari also paints a pleasant picture of what it was like to be a “hunter-gatherer,” that is, to live a subsistence lifestyle using existing resources: collecting fruit, berries, nuts and roots and also harvesting what live land and water animals they could with only rudimentary tools and weapons. He suggests that, since they lived in tropical climates and so didn’t need to worry about winter, they would spend the day out finding food, then return to camp for a relaxed evening of socializing.

 

He compares that with being a farmer, which entailed backbreaking work beginning at dawn and not always ending at dusk. Along with the ever-present possibilities of flood or drought, Harari points out, growing the same crop year after year led to numerous possible causes of poor, harvests including nutrient depletion, parasites, and diseases.

 

I’m only about halfway through the book, so I’m sure further fascinating surprises await me, but even the briefly summarized highlights above are extremely thought-provoking.

 

What if Floresiensis had turned out to dominate the planet? Think how much smaller our houses would be, how many fewer resources it would take to build, heat and cool them. Maybe we would have gone on to use goats as our mounts rather than horses…

 

The Smithsonian website mentions that archeologists have given Floriensis the nickname “Hobbits”; the reason is perfectly obvious, of course.

 

By the way, large predators and other natural dangers are not the reason Floriensis no longer exists: Homo Sapiens are. The book is not kind to Sapiens, by the way; it points out that, as many different species as modern practices have put at risk, sapienkind exterminated many, many more on its road to becoming the planet’s dominant species.

 

The advantage Sapiens have over every other species on the planet, Harari postulates, is our ability to visualize and place trust in “unreal” things. Among these are money, social hierarchies, and human rights–all concepts which have been fundamental to society, but whose meanings and consequences have changed depending on the time and culture. He also claims gossip is essential to organizing society; by giving people information about who is reliable and who is not, gossip allowed early humans to decide what hunter-gatherer bands they would align with and who they would support as their leaders. He goes on to claim it is still more than the much-maligned pastime the word has come to imply–that we still base vital decisions on what we learn from gossiping and backbiting.

 

Harari has gone on to write a sequel he named “Homo Deus,” Latin for, essentially, “humans as god.” I guess I’ll finish “Sapiens" before I decide whether to read that one.