Unstoppable Us
Harari includes a Timeline of History at the beginning of Unstoppable Us.
PART 1, HISTORY OF HUMANITY
He begins with 6 million years ago with a picture of an upright creature that is a cross between a human and an ape. The caption reads that this was the “last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.”
He follows with a jump to the 2.5 million years ago mark in which he states that “Humans evolve in Africa.” The Gospel of Harari moves forward another half-million years with the “[e]volution of different kinds of humans.”
By 400,000 years ago, “Neanderthals evolve in Europe and the Middle East” and 300,000 years ago, “Sapiens evolve in Africa.” 70,000 years ago, “the Sapiens leave Africa in large numbers.” 35,000 years ago the Neanderthals are extinct and “Sapiens are the last surviving kind of human.”
“Planet Earth was once ruled by many different animals . . . But now we humans rule everything: the land, the sea, and the sky. . . . The only reason lions, dolphins, and eagles still exist is because we allow them to.”
He concludes this introduction with, “AND it’s a true story.”
Chapter 1 teaches the children that millions of years ago, we were just ordinary animals who ate worms and climbed trees to pick fruit. Until humans learned to make tools, the other animals weren’t afraid of them.
Harari explains that when kids wake up in the night frightened that there are monsters under their beds that this is simply “a memory from millions of years ago . . . [when] monsters . . . sneaked up on children in the night.” His example is of a lion coming to eat the child. This idea is repeated in the closing of his book.
Next, the humans invented fire.
“A single weak human with a fire stick could burn down an entire forest in a matter of hours, destroying thousands of trees and killing thousands of animals.”
Now, the humans could cook their food. As a result, “humans started to change: they had smaller teeth, smaller stomachs . . . and much more free time.”
Harari expands on this by stating that some scientists “suggest it was cooking that made it possible for the human brain to start growing.”
Once they started cooking . . . humans could spend far less energy chewing and digesting and had more energy to feed big brains. Their stomachs shrank, their brains grew, and people got smarter.
In the next chapter, the children learn that “our planet was actually home to many different kinds of humans.”
Harari introduces the Floresians and follows with the “bigger-brained” Neanderthals, and the Denisovans. However, according to him, the Sapiens eventually killed off all of these “ancestors.”
“. . . when the new super-Sapiens reached Europe, they picked all the pears, ate all the berries, and hunted all the deer. This meant that the local Neanderthals had nothing left to eat, so they died of hunger. And if any Neanderthals tried to stop the Sapiens from taking all the food, the Sapiens probably killed them.”
“Then our ancestors went to Siberia and took all the food from the Denisovans. And then they went to Flores, and . . . soon there wasn’t a single small human or small elephant to be found. And when all the other humans were gone, our ancestors still weren’t satisfied. Although they were now incredibly powerful, they wanted even more power and more food, so they sometimes fought one another.”
The next chapter begins with, “You see, we Sapiens are not very nice animals.” Often, he concludes, this is due to different skin colors, languages, or religions.
“But a few years ago, scientists discovered that at least some of our Sapiens ancestors didn’t kill or starve all the other humans they met.”
Harari explains that because of our knowledge of DNA, scientists have determined that some Neanderthals had children with Sapiens. I guess Harari intends for these middle-grade students to conclude that some people today are not 100% evil since they have some Neanderthal DNA . . .
Harari then speculates as to what the world would be like today if “our ancestors had been nicer and had allowed the Neanderthals and the Floresians to go on living and developing.”
https://www.ynharari.com/book/unstoppable_us/