These evolutionary adaptations gave birth to languages, beliefs in gods and ways to work together to accomplish amazing feats from sending people to the moon to the invention of money and the reliance on corporations to produce things that we can consume. A second key factor is the Homo Sapiens’ ability to invent stories and to imagine things that do not visibly exist. Cooperation allowed rather weak creatures to dominate their environment, even to the extent that they were so successful in hunting mastodons and mammoths that these large animals became extinct. Harari concludes that two key developments account for the rise of Homo Sapiens as the only surviving humans and their spread to almost all corners of the globe. Presumably a second volume is planned that will continue the stories of modern sapiens as they exist today with a peek into possible future conditions. With Unstoppable Us, Harari has simplified his ideas for young readers in a magnificent, age-appropriate edition with pleasing illustrations by Ruiz and a graphically appealing hardcover that is worthy of an award for design.Ĭlearly identified as Volume 1, the current book covers the time period from the emergence of the last common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees six million years ago through the rise of different kinds of humans, the spread of humans and the extinction of Neanderthals, the last of the non-Sapiens humans 35,000 years ago to 15,000 years ago, a date that corresponded to the extinction of most large land animals in the Americas.

It was translated into dozens of additional languages and adapted into a two-volume graphic novel. When historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari published Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind in English translation in 2015, it quickly became a “phenomenal” bestseller and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for several years.

Unstoppable us book