Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Two of the ideas you’ll keep

The Clif summary of Sapiens pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.

1. The Cognitive Revolution ~70,000 years ago gave Sapiens a unique ability to talk about things that exist only in the collective imagination, gods, nations, money, human rights, and it is these shared fictions, not superior strength, that let millions of strangers cooperate.
2. Large-scale human cooperation always rests on an 'imagined order': a set of shared myths that exists only in people's minds yet shapes real behavior, from Hammurabi's Code to the American Declaration of Independence, both of which claim their hierarchies are natural and eternal.

The other 5 — and the full 12-minute summary — are in the app.

What’s inside: 9 chapters

The whole summary runs about 12 minutes, read or listened to.

1. An Animal of No Significance
2. The Cognitive Revolution: The Power of Fiction
3. The Agricultural Revolution: History's Biggest Fraud
4. Building Pyramids: Imagined Orders
5. Memory, Writing, and the Fictions of Hierarchy
6. The Unification of Humankind: Money, Empire, Religion
7. The Scientific Revolution: The Discovery of Ignorance
8. The Marriage of Science, Empire, and Capitalism
9. Happiness and the End of Homo Sapiens