![]() The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. “The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. “Three important revolutions shaped the course of history,” the book proposes. “Sapiens” has sold more than twelve million copies. ![]() President Barack Obama, speaking to CNN in 2016, compared the book to a visit he’d made to the pyramids of Giza. Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs-evolution, agriculture, economics-while watching their personal narratives, even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility. The book, published in Hebrew as “A Brief History of Humankind,” became an Israeli best-seller then, as “ Sapiens,” it became an international one. ![]() ![]() Harari, who had previously written about aspects of medieval and early-modern warfare-but whose intellectual appetite, since childhood, had been for all-encompassing accounts of the world-wrote in plain, short sentences that displayed no anxiety about the academic decorum of a study spanning hundreds of thousands of years. In 2008, Yuval Noah Harari, a young historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began to write a book derived from an undergraduate world-history class that he was teaching. ![]()
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