This book came out in 2015 and is recommended by many well-named personalities like Barak Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerburg. Book takes us to history and tries to answer the question, why out of all the species only humans came on top? What is it about Homosapiens? What is it about us?


One of the reoccurring answers is, Our ability to share a story, our ability to tell “Fictional Truths” such as nation, ideas of the things that don’t exist. nation or money are not physical things. But are ideas, the stories, that sapiens used to bind people, our ability to convince people, is the reason for the survival of humans.


If I tell you about the 1930s, do you think that is old? What about 1700? When we hear these years, it feels like ages like really old times. But after this book, you get a new perspective they don’t feel that old. Because this book starts by talking about 13.5 Billion years ago! The big bang. How energy, time, and space came together and Big Bang happened! Fast forward to 200,000 years from today, that’s when we find the early signs of humans!


This book states that there were 3 incidences that cemented the dominance of Homosapiens. In the first 130,000 years literally, nothing was happening we were just roaming around playing in the grass, maybe made some sounds here and there, just like animals. 130,000 years later the first revolution started happening that really defines Homosapiens, this was the cognitive revolution. Our ability to share ideas and make groups and work together. Our ability to tell stories.



At that time we were not the only human formed species there were neanderthals,



"Neanderthal"


Neanderthals were a whole group of people living on the European side and Homosapieans were in Africa mostly and some people still have some neanderthal DNA, but because of human’s ability to share ideas and make groups, we were able to win over them and eliminate them!


The second big revolution was about 10000 years ago, that is the agricultural revolution, This is the main reason for the shaping of the society, because of agriculture, that is planting in soil. A lot of Ideas came. Humans started settling, the need to always travel was no more, because of agriculture the idea of possession came into place, “This is my land and that is yours”, Ideas of transactions and colonization also originated from here. And if you think about it, Wars also originated from here. It basically developed the colony system that we today live in.



The Third Revolution was the scientific revolution which was about 500 years ago, the development of steam engines and all. From then exponential development in this field is taking place. The scientific revolution is pretty self-explanatory and straight forward, so let’s not go into too deep.


Instead, let’s talk about this idea of “Fictional truths” Two of the greatest examples are Money and Nation. What is a nation? This portion of land? But it is still land, right? It is just a fictional idea, of binding people based on geographical area. We attach our emotions with it, patriotism but it is necessary for survival. The same goes for money, isn’t it just metal and paper? This idea of Fictional truths is truly fascinating to me. Money is just an agreement we all have made. Specifically fiat currency, it is currency specific to countries. Like USD for US and rupee for India.


In some military camps, cigarettes were used as currency even non-smokers will trade with the cigarette. Money is just an Idea, Lets take it a further step ahead. All the money in the world adds up to 60 trillion dollars, yet the sum total of coins and banknotes is 6 trillion dollars!!! Read that again  All the money in the world adds up to 60 trillion dollars, yet the sum total of coins and banknotes is 6 trillion dollars it means that 90% of our money doesn’t physically exist it’s just written in records!


This is just a wonderful book with specific chapters on money, religion, nation. Highly recommended. You should understand that humans dominate other species because of our ability to tell stories and have faith.


You can buy the book from here - https://amzn.to/2ZwFblk


Happy Reading!