{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Book","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/","name":"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind","shortTitle":"Sapiens","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Yuval Noah Harari"},"isbn":"9780062316097","numberOfPages":21,"wordCount":9060,"timeRequired":"PT36M","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:49:15Z","dateModified":"2025-12-17T09:35:26Z","publisher":{"@id":"https://readstacks.com/#organization","@type":"Organization","name":"Read Stacks"},"workExample":[{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-1-an-animal-of-no-significance-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-1-an-animal-of-no-significance-2/","name":"An Animal of No Significance","position":1,"wordCount":442,"timeRequired":"PT2M","abstract":"Harari opens on a cosmic scale to make a humbling point: for almost all of its existence, Homo sapiens was an animal of no particular importance. About 13.8 billion years ago matter and energy appeared, the domain of physics; some 300,000 years later atoms and…","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-2-the-tree-of-knowledge-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-2-the-tree-of-knowledge-2/","name":"The Tree of Knowledge","position":2,"wordCount":422,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"Sapiens did not come to dominate the planet because its muscles were stronger or its tools were sharper than those of rival species — Neanderthals, for instance, were probably physically tougher. The real advantage, Harari argues, was cognitive: a mind that emerged roughly seventy thousand…","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-3-a-day-in-the-life-of-adam-and-eve-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-3-a-day-in-the-life-of-adam-and-eve-2/","name":"A Day in the Life of Adam and Eve","position":3,"wordCount":456,"timeRequired":"PT2M","abstract":"Harari uses this chapter to dismantle the idea that there is a single natural way to be human. After the Cognitive Revolution, culture — not biology alone — increasingly shaped how people lived, and forager societies varied enormously across time and place.","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-4-the-flood-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-4-the-flood-2/","name":"The Flood","position":4,"wordCount":458,"timeRequired":"PT2M","abstract":"This chapter delivers one of Harari's most unsettling arguments: long before agriculture or industry, foraging Homo sapiens were already among the most ecologically destructive species that ever lived. Wherever sapiens expanded, the landscape did not simply gain a clever ape — it lost animals that…","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-5-historys-biggest-fraud-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-5-historys-biggest-fraud-2/","name":"History’s Biggest Fraud","position":5,"wordCount":439,"timeRequired":"PT2M","abstract":"The agricultural revolution is usually taught as a triumph — the moment humanity climbed out of hunter-gatherer scarcity into settled abundance. Harari's provocation in this chapter is to read it instead as a trap, possibly history's biggest fraud: Sapiens as a species gained far more…","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-6-building-pyramids-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-6-building-pyramids-2/","name":"Building Pyramids","position":6,"wordCount":429,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"Large societies require a shared order to function at all, and Harari's central claim in this chapter is that the order holding them together is imagined — not imaginary in the sense of false or made up on a whim, but in the sense that…","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-7-memory-overload-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-7-memory-overload-2/","name":"Memory Overload","position":7,"wordCount":421,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"As villages grew into towns and towns grew into early states and empires, human memory hit a hard biological ceiling. No single mind, however sharp, could accurately track thousands of individual debts, land boundaries, tax obligations, and grain shipments across a growing population — the…","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-8-there-is-no-justice-in-history-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-8-there-is-no-justice-in-history-2/","name":"There Is No Justice in History","position":8,"wordCount":425,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"If imagined orders are powerful enough to move stone and build empires, Harari argues they are equally powerful at producing imagined hierarchies. Class, gender, and race have all, at different points in history, been treated as fixed facts of nature, even though each is really…","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-9-the-arrow-of-history-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-9-the-arrow-of-history-2/","name":"The Arrow of History","position":9,"wordCount":421,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"Cultures constantly change, collide, and sometimes fuse into one another, and yet Harari argues there is a genuine direction visible in the long arc of history: a steady increase in complexity and integration. Small, isolated worlds that once had no contact with each other get…","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-10-the-scent-of-money-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-10-the-scent-of-money-2/","name":"The Scent of Money","position":10,"wordCount":448,"timeRequired":"PT2M","abstract":"Money, Harari argues, is not really metal or paper at all — it is trust at scale, a shared belief that a token accepted today can reliably be exchanged later for real goods and someone else's real labor, held by millions of people who have…","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-11-imperial-visions-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-11-imperial-visions-2/","name":"Imperial Visions","position":11,"wordCount":402,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"Empires unify huge, culturally diverse territories through a combination of force and administration. They collect taxes, build roads, standardize laws, and create a shared political language flexible enough to hold many originally unrelated cultures inside one governing frame.","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-12-the-law-of-religion-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-12-the-law-of-religion-2/","name":"The Law of Religion","position":12,"wordCount":434,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"Religions, in Harari's framing, operate as engines of order, large-scale cooperation, and shared meaning. They bind complete strangers together across vast distances by offering a common moral map and a story large enough to make sense of life, death, and suffering in terms everyone in the group can agree on.","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-13-the-secret-of-success-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-13-the-secret-of-success-2/","name":"The Secret of Success","position":13,"wordCount":434,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"Why did some cultures spread across continents while others shrank into local footnotes? Harari's answer resists the comfortable idea that there is a single best cultural blueprint. Historical expansion, on the evidence, has rewarded adaptability far more consistently than it has rewarded virtue, raw intelligence, or brute strength.","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-14-the-discovery-of-ignorance-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-14-the-discovery-of-ignorance-2/","name":"The Discovery of Ignorance","position":14,"wordCount":432,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"Most premodern societies operated on the shared assumption that the core truths worth knowing were already fully known — handed down complete by gods, ancestors, or ancient authoritative texts, and requiring interpretation rather than genuine discovery.","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-15-the-marriage-of-science-and-empire-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-15-the-marriage-of-science-and-empire-2/","name":"The Marriage of Science and Empire","position":15,"wordCount":461,"timeRequired":"PT2M","abstract":"Harari's argument here is that modern science and European empire grew up together, feeding each other so tightly that neither can be fully understood alone. What set the modern West apart, he contends, was not simply superior technology but a shared mindset between the scientist…","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-16-the-capitalist-creed-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-16-the-capitalist-creed-2/","name":"The Capitalist Creed","position":16,"wordCount":442,"timeRequired":"PT2M","abstract":"Capitalism, Harari argues, runs at its core on faith in growth — the assumption, largely absent from most premodern economies, that the total pie of wealth in the world can genuinely expand rather than staying fixed.","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-17-the-wheels-of-industry-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-17-the-wheels-of-industry-2/","name":"The Wheels of Industry","position":17,"wordCount":414,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"Industrialization, Harari argues, was fundamentally a revolution in how energy gets converted into usable work, not merely a revolution in machinery for its own sake. For nearly all of human history before it, productive work ultimately depended on muscle — human or animal — and…","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-18-a-permanent-revolution-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-18-a-permanent-revolution-2/","name":"A Permanent Revolution","position":18,"wordCount":425,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"Modernity, in Harari's account, arrives as instability made normal. Institutions that once lasted for centuries with barely any visible change — inherited crafts, local customs, entire dynasties — become genuinely temporary within a single lifetime, and constant change itself turns into the new social baseline rather than the exception.","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-19-and-they-lived-happily-ever-after-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-19-and-they-lived-happily-ever-after-2/","name":"And They Lived Happily Ever After","position":19,"wordCount":422,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"Does the long march of human history — more food, more power, more knowledge, more empires — actually translate into more happiness for the people living inside it? The question turns out to be much harder to answer than it first sounds, because happiness itself…","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-20-the-end-of-homo-sapiens-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/chapter-20-the-end-of-homo-sapiens-2/","name":"The End of Homo Sapiens","position":20,"wordCount":419,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"For most of the book's narrative, Homo sapiens looks like the final winner of a long evolutionary and historical story — the species that outcompeted every rival human species, tamed fire and wheat, built empires and religions, and now dominates the planet.","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"},{"@type":"Chapter","@id":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/afterword-the-animal-that-became-a-god-2/","url":"https://readstacks.com/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/afterword-the-animal-that-became-a-god-2/","name":"The Animal that Became a God","wordCount":414,"timeRequired":"PT1.5M","abstract":"In a remarkably brief span of geological history, an ordinary primate on the African savanna became a force capable of reshaping entire continents, driving other species extinct, and remaking ecosystems on a planetary scale. Harari's closing argument is that this transformation runs through every chapter…","datePublished":"2025-12-16T17:55:21Z","dateModified":"2026-07-01T00:00:00Z"}]}