Sapiens, Ch. 4: "Don't believe tree-huggers"

It’s really hard, no, it’s impossible to know if a species (like the wooly mammoth) disappeared long ago due to the long ago, unpreserved behavior of another long ago species (like Homo sapiens). 

Even when there is an historical record, it’s a challenge to link an animal’s extinction to human cause! Consider the dodo. We love to imagine that humans did it, but it’s possible that humans merely finished them off while they were already on their way out.

So, because of how hard it is, no, how impossible it is to know if sapiens of 45,000 years ago caused another species to go extinct, then here’s what I see when I read Chapter 4: 

I see an author who is continuing to make an argument about human nature by continuing to wield science in an unscientific way. He presents science as if it’s capable of knowing what the author is claiming about human nature, but it is not. Even when Harari concedes that there are debates or that it’s difficult or impossible to actually know X, Y, and Z, he’s carrying on with his story. That’s not science. And that wouldn’t be a problem, necessarily, if this book were not on the science shelves and read by millions as a science book. 

I’ve read well-researched novels, full of science, that aren’t on the science shelves. I’ve read well-researched science-fiction, full of science, that isn’t on the science shelves. Fiction and science-fiction dig marvelously into, and reveal brilliant truths about, human nature. But nobody’s calling any of that “science” and shelving it with “science”… why Sapiens? I don’t have an answer right now. I’m flummoxed. I’m blocked. 

I’m the Underground Man?

“Why, of course, the laws of nature. The deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling. Accept it for a fact. When they prove to you that in reality, one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have to just accept it. There is no help for it. For twice two is a law of mathematics. Just try refuting it. Upon my word, they will shout at you. It is no use protesting. It is a case of twice two makes four. Nature does not ask your permission. She has nothing to do with your wishes and whether you like her laws or dislike them you are bound to accept her as she is and consequently all her conclusions.”

—sarcastic narrator, Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky (Part 1, Chapter 3, about three-quarters of the way through)

Because I don’t approach ancient history from the point of view of someone who is trying to define human nature–as, surprise!, exactly as it’s always been defined by philosophers and religions in the European and American intellectual traditions and by pop culture right now–I’m not satisfied by Chapter 4. 

It’s not as if he hasn’t done any research for this Chapter. Like with the last chapter, the notes for Chapter 4 are heavy with citations to the anthropological and otherwise literature. 

But the narrative he provides can’t help but paint sapiens as destructive and nowhere does he discuss what unintentional or even passive processes could have led to what we see as destructive consequences, now, to us being “the most destructive force the Animal Kingdom ever produced.”

The last page of Chapter 3.

Let me try to say this better. He’s interested in narrating humans, or sapiens, as an animal of significance (as opposed to one of “no significance” that we evolved from previously). And the “Cognitive Revolution” is what changed hominins from the former, no-significance state to the present state of significance. 

We’re supposed to think this was like a phase change, like liquid to gas, which happens quickly and results in something that is very different from what it was just before, But, as we discussed in prior posts, what Harari sees as a sudden shift could be an illusion caused by the great limitation to what material can physically survive time intact. 

So… if we have no reason to believe that there was a sudden shift, as is crucial to the narrative of Sapiens, then the idea that sapiens are profoundly different from earlier forms is not necessarily one we must take up either. 

Why does this matter? It matters because  “The Flood” of Chapter 4 is referring to sapiens. Humans flooded the planet and devastated it like the Biblical flood. 

(I don’t remember the Bible noting any extinctions and cannot be moved to check… Cuvier, to my knowledge, was one of the people to bring that interpretation to Genesis, to make sense of the mammoth and dinosaur bones he studied). 

In this stage of Harari’s narrative, a flood of sapiens into new lands wiped out so many large terrestrial species who were naive to their ways, having never co-evolved with hominins like the savvier, grittier animals of Africa and Asia who did. 

But extinctions were also happening across Africa, Europe, and Asia while hominins were there, and Harari leaves those out. If a reader is new to any of this, a reader may mistakenly think that only animals in Australia, Madagascar, many many other islands, and the Americas were going extinct. Not the case. So how do we explain extinctions on the big continents that Harari has left out of the narrative? 

How would we know, in those places, if hominins were the cause or if hominins were the main cause or the most important cause compared to, say, climate change? 

With the extinctions in Africa, Europe, and Asia, we run into the same problems for the cases Harari uses. So why do his examples seem so much more hominin-caused, errr, sapiens-caused than the extinctions that happened along the way in Africa for all those millions of years that hominins were evolving there as “an animal of supposedly “no significance”? 

Is it because we refuse to let coincidences be mere coincidences when we cannot really know causes?

Like, what if climate change hits large species on islands faster or more intensely than it hits species on larger land masses? Australia is a large land mass. So is North and South America… But what about others… were there other extinctions going on on in Africa, Asia, and Europe at the time? Could those be attributed to sapiens or climate change or neither or both? He doesn’t go there at all. We’re given no context. We’re shown only what he shows us. It’s easy to go along with the story he tells and there’s nothing necessarily horribly wrong with it.  But thinking a bit about what he doesn’t show us makes that story just a bit harder to accept as definitive.

And that’s why the tree-hugger thing irritates me. He’s clearly angry. As we learn on other pages, he’s probably a vegetarian or vegan. He cares deeply about animals and about the planet. He’s probably a tree-hugger! And so “Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature,” is perhaps a bitter reckoning with old mistaken beliefs he held. Or perhaps we’re sensing a spirit of blame. People are looking for people to blame for our current condition and for our powerlessness. Blaming sapiens who were evolved for destruction… maybe that feels good, especially if we’re feeling desperate and powerless. But is that science?

In the last graf, Harari expresses the hope that if more people understood that sapiens caused these extinctions long ago then maybe they would be moved to do something about what we do to the planet right now. The flood is not over. Far from it. People are looking for reasons for hope, for knowledge to have the power that all our teachers told us it has. Believing them feels good, especially if we’re feeling desperate and powerless. 

But is this the only way to look at the world and our place in it, and our responsibility for it? 

What does living in harmony with nature actually mean?

To Harari it means not causing any extinctions. 

Extinctions are constantly happening. To live in nature is to change, to be changed by context (including others), and to cause change context (including others).

Change, including extinction, is the soundtrack. If that’s harmony or disharmony to a listener, then so be it.

So, if the tree-hugger thing is meant to stick it to people who don’t understand that life is constant change, then I can see where the snark is coming from. The frustration. And he’s concerned. See last graf, below, and more to come in Chapter 5! 

But we don’t know if any of what sapiens wrought on their ecosystems was actually destruction. Okay, the fires. But was it egregious? Gratuitous? Or was it survival? Were they killing more than they needed? We have no way of knowing. If they weren’t then we can say they were living in harmony with nature, as nature is a pull and push, constantly. Stasis isn’t life. Eco-Relationships, overtime, are in flux. I’m guessing more than a few tree-huggers know this. I doubt all of them believe nothing evolves and expect no change in lineages resulting in no change in relationships between them and no changes in the ecosystem. 

If sapiens weren’t taking more than they needed then where does the outrage go? 

Could we even write chapter 4 like Harari did? He was able to write it like this because we cannot know if they were wantonly destructive or … instead… living in harmony the only way they could as a species with a big hungry brain. 

It’s possible that they took what big brains need to live. It’s possible we’re seeing the consequences of outgrowing milk so soon in infancy, needing so much food beyond the breast, and shortening interbirth intervals that increase the number of big hungry brains on the landscape. 

Staying alive. Is that so wrong? 

And, no, none of that is equal to industrial pollution and capitalist, consumption culture, now–his “third wave” of sapiens-caused extinctions. And none of what I described above is the same as empires. There is no need to narrate early sapiens exploration and dispersal as anything but the result of population growth, curiosity, adventure, and resource acquisition.

By the end of this chapter, a reader can feel pretty low, pretty despicable. And I think Harari wants us to feel that way. All I can think is that this chapter throws his whole scheme off: Sapiens have not yet had a Cognitive Revolution. 

Chapter 5 is next. To be continued…

**

P.S. We finished painting the mudroom (a.k.a. the cave) with chalkboard paint!…