
With the ability to record your transaction with the farmer, you can make sure he keeps his word if he needs to promise you a pig. It’s easy to see how having writing and money would make your situation a lot better. He can promise you one, but how do you know he’ll be honest about it? But what if the farmer in your town already has a knife? Or maybe he’s not got a pig to kill for you yet. Seems easy enough to just make the trade. Your assortment of knives and swords provide good means to trade for food, like pork. Let’s imagine that you’re living at the time and you’ve chosen blacksmithing as your profession. While this new system was better, it quickly became inefficient. These individuals would then trade or barter with farmers, exchanging their goods for food. This let some people begin doing other work like weaving or blacksmithing. With agriculture, humans became more efficient with their time and energy. Lesson 2: The inventions of money and writing let mankind trade more efficiently, paving the way for further expansion. Coping with this larger community would require mankind to make even more advances to get to where we are today. Things were looking up but there was a problem. This new method, although slow to begin, was far more efficient than the old ways, and let population growth explode. By deserting old hunting and gathering methods for farming, mankind further improved their situation. Not long later, the Agricultural Revolution gave humans another great advantage. Because humans could cooperate as a society and flexibly, ideas spread which made even more progress possible. This helped early people share lessons about predators and food with each other. Language set our species apart from others because it made us able to distribute information more freely. Forming communities, developing better hunting tools, and building simple trade networks made everything about life and survival easier.Īs the ability to communicate grew, so did the population. With their newfound better brains, Homo sapiens could outperform other species of humans. This was a time when mental development rose relatively suddenly, setting our ancient ancestors apart. These began with the Cognitive Revolution around 70,000 years ago. Most importantly are the differences in humans brains. Homo sapiens had some distinct advantages that let them get ahead of other human species on earth.
#Sapiens by yuval noah harari. pdf#
If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.ĭownload PDF Lesson 1: Exponential population growth began with agricultural advances after early humans had the ability to think and speak.
