Sapiens

I’ve been slow to read Yuval Noah Harai’s Book Sapiens, A Brief History of Humanity.  While he makes some claims about our ancestors’ lifestyles that seem hard to believe given the paucity of evidence that they left behind, it’s a terrific book that got me thinking. I’ll write more about it in the future.

I thought about it earlier this week when I drove in my car to Home Depot to find a replacement part for a door handle that broke. The store had thousands of parts for doors and handles, but they didn’t carry my brand.  I went home and did what I probably should have done in the first place: I checked on Amazon.  Sure enough, they had the part, and it was at my front door the next day.

Today I went to a big pet store to get food for our dogs.  The variety of food and brands was unbelievable.  I just wanted lamb-base food for small dogs.  Plenty of choices.

It got me thinking about Sapiens and how people lived before the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago, the Scientific Revolution 500 years ago, and even the Industrial Revolution two hundred years ago.  There is not one thing in our condominium that I have made for myself to use or eat that I haven’t bought from someone else using money (a subject that Harai writes about extensively). 

I think I would have been helpless on the frontier with no skills except to write, read and practice law.  But then I realized that, while none of my ancestors lived on the American frontier, obviously some of them lived in a pre-industrial society.  I’m glad they made it!