Sapiens

That’s from Chapter 1 “An Animal of No Significance” in Part One “The Cognitive Revolution” in which we learn: “The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.” Then something happened around 70,000 years ago that changed everything.

But first, a little story. The other day while we were on our weekly adventure driving to Whole Foods, Emerson asked me, “Where did the first person come from before there was a person?”

I told him that was a very good question. (Hah.) Then, I asked him how he came up with that question—was it something you heard in a book you were listening to or…? Nope, he says it just popped into his head.

Alrighty. The stalling was over. I shared a (very) rough idea of where the first person came from.

But Harari gives us a more (poetically) precise answer: “Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.” <- Take a moment to wrap your brain around THAT.

Now, get this: 100,000 years ago, we weren’t even the only “humans” on the planet. In fact, apparently at least SIX other human species inhabited the Earth with us. <- Take a moment to wrap your brain around THAT.

So… Our family tree is a little more interesting than most of us think.

Let’s dust off our old biology books and recall that organisms are categorized into a family, genus, and species. We are part of the great ape family. The homo or “human” genus and the sapiens species. (Sapiens means “wise” so Homo sapiens means “wise man.” An “immodest” naming as Harari quips.)

It was only 70,000 years ago that something happened to make us Sapiens. That something was the first of Harari’s three revolutions: The Cognitive Revolution. And, the most salient aspect of that revolution was, in short, our unique language.

Other creatures communicate. For example, monkeys can warn another monkey about a dangerous bird vs. a lion—which was discovered when researchers taped their communication and played it back to see monkeys look up at the bird warning and scamper up a tree in response to the lion warning.

But we (apparently) were the first species to be able to TELL STORIES. We could talk about the lion we saw yesterday by the huge rock on the path that leads to the river while we were walking with two of our friends right before we planned to pick some berries… And, for whatever reason, our other human relatives didn’t evolve to have that capacity. And that changed everything.

As Harari puts it: “What was the Sapiens’ secret of success? How did we manage to settle so rapidly in so many distant and ecologically different habitats? How did we push all other human species into oblivion? Why couldn’t even the strong, brainy, cold-proof Neanderthals survive our onslaught? The debate continues to rage. The most likely answer is the very thing that makes the debate possible: Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language.”

P.S. Fun facts: Humans used stone tools for the first time 2.5 million years ago. And: “Some human species may have made occasional use of fire as early as 800,00 years ago. By about 300,000 years ago, Homo erectus, Neanderthals and the forefathers of Homo sapiens were using fire on a daily basis.”

Part Two is all about The Agricultural Revolution. Before we get there, we have this passage from Chapter 3: “A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve”—which is as interesting as it sounds.

Although obviously this isn’t a nutrition book, I’m pulling this Idea out because I want to highlight the importance of having a VARIED diet.

So… For 2.5 million years, humans foraged. Then, around 12,000 years ago, we incrementally transitioned into the second revolution that changed our species: The Agricultural Revolution.

(Pop quiz: What and when were the other two Revolutions? … Pop answer: The Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago and The Scientific Revolution 500 years ago! :)

Harari tells a fascinating story about how we most likely evolved from foragers to farmers— consuming tiny amounts of wild wheat (and rice and corn…) to slowly consuming more then deliberately planting it then… VOILA. We woke up X generations later and we were farmers.

There were obviously a lot of long-term pros and cons to that shift. But, Harari makes the point that no one made the decision consciously and once it was made, other options were cut off. (We talk about a similar pattern in our use of technology in Conquering Digital Addiction 101 in which I suggest we avoid the “smashing Luddite” path AND the “addicted user” path and deliberately opt for the Optimizite path in which we wisely use tech tools to shape our best lives.)

And… One unquestionably negative trade-off of the Agricultural Revolution was the diminution in the variety of the foods we eat. Throw in the Industrial Revolution (which is, of course, a product of the Scientific Revolution) and we have a diet that mostly consists of Michael Pollan’s “edible foodlike substances” that (LITERALLY) didn’t exist 150 years ago.

You don’t need to be a very wise great ape to realize that isn’t a very smart trade. And, the same modestly intelligent human can make the connection to our poor diets and the rise of obesity and all the diseases we don’t want.

So… For our purposes: How’re YOU doing with that? As per Nutrition 101, first step: Eat real food. aka: If it’s in a package and/or made of ingredients you can’t pronounce that were invented in the last 100 years, don’t eat it and/or limit it and/or know you’re violating millions of years of evolution and will be paying the price in x years/decades.

Then, for the ambitious sapiens, consider making it a game to see how many DIFFERENT greens and veggies you can eat in a given week. I literally make it a sport to go through my farmer’s market and find all the “weird” stuff. And, when we peruse the organic section of our produce departments, let’s see if we can sample all the things we don’t usually eat.

P.S. We’re in the process of converting our little downtown backyard into a micro (permaculture) farm with the explicit goal of seeing if we can set a record for highest variety of veggies/greens per space. The idea of picking something weird and eating it x minutes later fires me up.

P.P.S. Speaking of fire, apparently chimps spend 5 hours a day eating raw food. Cooking helped us more efficiently digest our food so we were able to trim that down to 1 hour per day of eating. And… Cooking also allowed us to get by with shorter intestines—which allowed us to allocate some of that energy to our brains which helped us evolve into who we are today.

< The book is PACKED with a ton of *fascinating* mind-expanding little details like that.

P.P.P.S. And, speaking of weird: Eating “weird” veggies is actually a specific tip in Mark Hyman’s great book Food: What the Heck Should I Eat? Note coming soon.

That’s from a chapter called “Building Pyramids” in Part Two in which we learn more about the types of stories we tell that make us who we are. (I was going to say “make us human” then remembered all the other human species with whom we used to share the planet! :)

Stories and myths create “imagined realities” and cultures that we then tend to accept without realizing that none of them are “natural” and/or “inevitable.” Harari brings us back to this theme throughout the book—analyzing everything from the myths of money and capitalism to religions and humanism.

For now, let’s talk about two interesting “myths” he analyzes. Both were told in 1776: The Code of Hammurabi in c. 1776 BC and the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 AD.

As Harari says: “Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.”

The primary point? We take the cultures in which we live for granted—that they are both natural and inevitable. But, they’re not. They’re simply “imagined realities.” <- Take a moment to wrap your brain around THAT. And then read the book for more. :)

To make a brief attempt at applying this wisdom to our lives today, how about a quick inventory: You know that vacation you’re dreaming of? Laughing as I type this but we’ve just been conditioned to think that’s awesome. That’s the “imagined reality” of “romantic consumerism.”

May we be more mindful of things we take for granted and more willing to Iconoclastically challenge the status quo as we Optimize our culture’s shared imagined realities!

The Scientific Revolution.

It wasn’t so much a revolution of knowledge per se. It was a revolution driven by a willingness to say “WE DON’T KNOW!” A revolution of ignoramuses willing to admit there was a lot they didn’t know coupled with a robust system to find practical answers to important questions.

Why is that relevant? Well, as Harari says in the lines right after the above passage: “Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known.”

Guess what? If everything is already known, there’s no need to ask any really meaningful questions, eh? (Harari makes the point that those traditions basically said, “All the answers are in this holy book. And, if it’s not in there, it’s not important so just ignore it.”)

One of the most powerful ways Harari tells THIS story is to juxtapose two world maps—one made in 1459 right before the Scientific Revolution kicked off and one after made after in 1525. The big difference? The old map of the world (see this) had no empty spaces. It was COMPLETELY filled in. The mapmakers acted like they knew it all and even put details into parts of the world they knew NOTHING about.

The new map? The new world maps (like this) were drawn with a TON of empty spaces. “The empty maps were a psychological and ideological breakthrough, a clear admission that Europeans were ignorant of large parts of the world.”

btw: Fascinating historical points. Columbus “discovered” the continent that became known as America. But… He refused to believe it. When he landed on the Bahamas he thought he had discovered islands en route to East Asia: “He called the people he found there ‘Indians’ because he thought he had landed in the Indies—what we now call the East Indies or the Indonesian archipelago. Columbus stuck to this error for the rest of his life. The idea that he had discovered a completely unknown continent was inconceivable for him and for many of his generation.”

btw2: America was mistakenly named by Martin Waldseemüller who thought explorer Amerigo Vespucci discovered it. As Harari says, “There is poetic justice in the fact that a quarter of the world, and two of its seven continents, are named after a little-known Italian whose sole claim to fame is that he had the courage to say, ‘We don’t know.’”

So… Let’s do a quick recap and see if we can apply this historical wisdom to our lives today.

First, my fellow Optimizing Ignoramus: We need to be willing to admit WE DON’T KNOW all there is about the world and our lives and, very importantly, what we’re capable of. Our maps need to have BLANK SPACES in them—“horizons of possibility” we get to go explore.

Then we’d be wise to experiment and measure our little (and big) tests as objectively as we can—making the connection between the mundane things like “When I eat that, my nose is stuffy” to “When I am online late at night I sleep poorly and that diminishes my energy which hinders my actualization” to… Whatever else you need to shine the light of ignorance on!

And, finally, we need to take that data and APPLY it to our lives. It needs to have practical use so we can gain new power by moving from *theory* to PRACTICE. Which leads to one more set of questions: What don’t you know about yourself? What’re you going to do about it?

Here’s to weaving powerful myths within the constraints of our culture as we Optimize,