Is Yuval Noah Harari a serious anthropologist? My reading of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Let me explain.
The cognitive revolution
According to the text (Chapter 5), the so-called Cognitive Revolution (about 70,000 years ago) was due to an accidental genetic change that gave Homo sapiens the unique ability to cooperate in large groups and dominate the planet. Harari makes it clear that “human domination” is negative.
Dominate the planet? Hyperbole! They are rudimentary beings struggling to survive in a hostile environment. Harari’s portrayal of sapiens as inherently violent and intolerant is not science; rather, it is sanctimonious sapiens whining.
Harari’s thesis attributes the revolution to “purely random” genetic mutations, but does not specify which mutations, how many, or how they occurred. His conclusion ignores the complexity of the evolution of language and symbolic thought, which both anthropologists and evolutionary biologists still debate without consensus.
The agricultural revolution
According to Harari, the Agricultural Revolution (10,000 years ago) is the greatest fraud in history: it worsened human life by increasing work, decreasing health, and reducing dietary diversity compared to hunter-gatherers (what Goethe, Schelling, or Heidegger would think of a peasant who feels miserable living off the land). Curious detail: Karl Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, paints the farmer and his class as a group of conservative smallholders, trapped on their plots of land, locked into archaic relations of production inherited from feudalism. He couldn’t stand them. Ideological coincidence?
The idea, dismissed as simplistic and sensationalist, ignores the long-term benefits.
While it is true that agriculture brought challenges such as disease and inequality, it also enabled massive population growth, the development of cities, writing, and civilizations. Anthropologist Marcus Paul criticizes Harari for presenting hypothetical “traps” as indisputable facts, ignoring regional variations—not to mention the evidence that foragers also faced famine and violence.
Furthermore, his teleological narrative implies an evolutionary “mistake” that does not correspond to current natural selection. Summary: Agriculture was not a “fraud,” but rather a trade-off that drove human progress.
The myth of Neanderthal extermination
Is Homo Sapiens really responsible for the extermination of Neanderthals through deliberate acts of genocide? While there is isolated evidence of trauma in Neanderthal remains (arm fractures or a spear wound to a rib in the Shanidar cave in Iraq), these are not necessarily attributed to humans (unless we forget hunting accidents and internal interspeciesconflicts).
Current scientific evidence points to a gradual, multi-causal process, not a sudden “brutal wipeout.”
Evolutionary moralism lurking
Chapter 8 of Sapiens, entitled “There is no justice in history,” is calamitous. It opens with a long list of horrors: “Human societies require unjust hierarchies and discrimination.” I can imagine the historian of historical objectivity von Ranke turning in his grave!
Harari should know that every specific moment in the present is an emerging causal process that is unavoidable in civilization (in every era) and not a plan for justice directed from a sidereal planning board.
What Harari pejoratively calls “racial hierarchy” is nothing more than an ancient form of social coagulation called culture. Imagine the reaction of an Egyptian priest at the court of Cheops in 2000 BC to a messenger from the Bedouins of Sinai defending the social equality of the Empire, or an Athenian general of the 5th century BC reading on a tablet that the Persians are “distant sapiens relatives of the Greeks.”
The cul de sac biological/reductionist
Sapiens seeks to explain the human experience in toto through genetic, hormonal, and neural processes, turning people into mere biochemical algorithms without agency or transcendence.
Harari attributes behavior to levels of serotonin or dopamine, while minimizing the weight of cultural, social, and spiritual factors. He dismisses the mind (in its Cartesian definition) and free will as fictions, falling into the paradox of believing that science—a mere descriptor of mechanisms—can also generate meanings and purposes proper to the humanistic sphere.
Scientific fetishism is evident when Harari “translates” human equality from the Declaration of Independence into evolutionary jargon:
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure. (Sapiens, p. 117).
The distance between the biological/deterministic paragraph and the original version is enormous. Never mind. For Harari, equality is not believed because it makes human sense, but to keep the social machinery running. What does not fit is treated as “useful superstition.”
Presentism as false morality
Harari’s presentism is a form of sanctimonious moralism. Presentism is the fashionable idea of viewing history from the present (ignoring that the “present moment” is necessarily superseded by every future judgment). For example, condemning Lucius Seneca for owning slaves during imperial Rome when the practice was accepted. The same is true in the history of science. What sense does it make to blame early 19th-century scientists for attributing the cause of the Black Death to the miasma theory?
Harari’s fallacies could fill a whole series of articles. Sapiens is peppered with what are called “smuggled facts.” These are artifices that present facts masked as “plausible” hypotheses. And what about the fallacious analogical reasoning of this simile? “A civilization is in a way like a person: it is born, develops, flourishes, and then dies out.” Now comes the conclusion: “Therefore, a civilization must also go through a period of adolescence in which all authority is questioned” (LAUGHTER).
