Sapiens, Ch. 3: Pure Imagination

My endeavor to review Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari one page at a time is, from now on, advancing one chapter at a time. 

In the last post, we finished Chapter 2. But I stopped short of facing every claim about Neanderthal cognition, or purported lack thereof, that Harari used to support the narrative that sapiens killed them off. And, on top of that, the idea that sapiens did so thanks to the unique ability to conceive and believe fictions, which Harari says is why humans cooperate like no other creature. We are here because of fictions. Neanderthals are not here because they lacked fictions.

But how could we know? Lets just forget the fact that earthlings galore are here, but lack fictions and focus, instead, only on this narrative about Neanderthals lacking the fictions that made sapiens the winners. How could we know they lacked fictions, or that any ancient hominin did? People today do all sorts of fiction/ myth/ abstract reasoning without leaving any material evidence of their ability or behavior, let alone of the kind that would preserve for tens of thousands of years or more. 

For example, just because there is archaeological evidence for long distance transport of fancy materials (like obsidian) and its trade, and just because this behavior is only associated with sapiens, that does not mean that how we do trade today is how trade was done by the sapiens of deep time–as Harari describes in Ch. 2, with strangers trusting one another because of shared fictions/ myths/ imagined realities. So, not even the archaeology of trade is evidence of fictions/ myths. But reading the last few pages of Chapter 2 sure makes it seem like it. 

You’d never guess from reading this book, but we cannot know whether Neanderthals possessed a capacity for fictions/ myths/ abstract reasoning on par with, or in the neighborhood, of contemporaneous sapiens. And that’s partly because we cannot actually know about the capacity for fictions/ myths/ abstract reasoning in minds of those ancient sapiens, either. Even if we could know all that about their minds, we could not know how inherited biology factored into fiction and, in turn, how fictions played into sapiens’ survival and reproduction of that inherited biology, or how any of that on the part of sapiens affected the fate of the Neanderthals (who are increasingly tough to write off as having been killed off or even died off, given the evidence from ancient DNA that we are descended from them). 

If this stuff really revs your engine, then I apologize for not dwelling more on it during Chapter 2. But my treatment of fictions wore itself out. 

Sure, yes, reading through what we do and do not know, and pondering what we can and cannot know, about Neanderthals and ancient Sapiens is fascinating. So we could have used those pages in Ch. 2 as inspiration to go and do just that. If you haven’t already read it, then check out Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death, and art. 

But chasing down evidence to support or not support Harari’s claims about ancient sapiens is, for our purposes, a wild goose chase given the larger, never-verifiable, never-knowable-with-science narrative that the claims serve. Again, the evidence in hand really isn’t important because it cannot actually verify the grand human evolutionary fictions about sapiens/ human nature in Harari’s book (and elsewhere).

And just before Chapter 2 ended, Harari cranked up the story. He claimed that before sapiens there was no culture. He doesn’t put it exactly like that, but he writes that “The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology. Until [then], the doings of all human species belonged to the realm of biology…” 

Not only does this framing draw a line–dividing a connected continuum of hominin existence over time–despite there being no evidence of such a thing. But it also asserts unknowable (and pretty nonsense) claims so confidently. That framing,  giving culture only to sapiens and relegating all prior existence to biology, underestimates the complexity of ancient hominin existence prior to 70,000 years ago. It also excludes that of other living species, like chimpanzees, who behave culturally, according to tradition or trends that are, conceivably, just as independent from biology as so much human behavior that we include in human culture. Leaf sponges. Self-tickling. Not-so-secret handshakes. Bonkers reactions to rainstorms and freakouts over big trees. Fashionable dress. 

Divorcing only humans, only “sapiens”, from biology (which, as we have seen in earlier pages, is an outdated hyper-genetically-determined version of biology’s connection to social behavior) is only a rhetorical device, to astound, to wow, to make the familiar (being human) all at once strange, or special in a fresh way. To achieve the numinous without need of the supernatural.

And why, not? As he elegantly describes, there is plenty about sapiens to be astounded about!

And on that note, let’s dig into Chapter 3: A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve.

Of course, it’s another metaphor. Another Biblical one. I recently learned from Gillian Beer in Darwin’s Plots that Darwin removed then returned “the Creator” in descriptions of evolution in different editions of Origin of Species. Evolutionary thinking has a long history of appropriating Genesis. Anyway, this metaphor is a familiar one, yes, but it’s suddenly very strange…