The Fictive Ape: An Analysis of Cooperation and Apotheosis in Yuval Noah Harari's 'Sapiens'

Introduction: The Sapiens Anomaly

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind begins not with an assertion of human exceptionalism, but with a statement of profound insignificance. For millions of years, the genus Homo occupied an unremarkable position in the animal kingdom. As recently as 70,000 years ago, at least six different human species coexisted on Earth, and our own ancestors, Homo sapiens, were far from dominant.1 They were animals of the middle, with an ecological impact comparable to that of fireflies or jellyfish, their lives dictated by the same evolutionary pressures that governed all other organisms.1 Today, only one human species remains, and it rules the planet.1 The central question that animates Harari's sweeping narrative is to account for this unprecedented and explosive ascent.

The book's central argument posits that the key to this transformation lies not in our physical prowess, tool use, or even our large brains—Neanderthals, after all, had larger brains than Sapiens.4 Instead, Harari locates the source of our power in a unique cognitive shift that allowed our species to create and inhabit a "dual reality".6 This reality consists of two parallel planes: the objective world of physical phenomena such as rivers, trees, and lions, and a far more potent, imagined world of "intersubjective" constructs.5 These constructs—gods, states, money, corporations, and human rights—exist nowhere but in our collective imagination, yet they have become the most powerful forces on the planet.1 The entire historical trajectory detailed in

Sapiens is an exploration of how this imagined reality grew to dominate, and ultimately control, the objective one, setting the stage for the book's dramatic and speculative conclusion.

To structure this grand narrative, Harari identifies three major revolutions that acted as catalysts, each successively amplifying the power of our collective fictions: the Cognitive Revolution (c. 70,000 years ago), the Agricultural Revolution (c. 12,000 years ago), and the Scientific Revolution (c. 500 years ago).9 These are not presented as discrete historical episodes but as interconnected stages in the evolution of human cooperation and power.12 The Cognitive Revolution provided the foundational ability to create fictions. The Agricultural Revolution used these fictions to organize vast, sedentary societies. The Scientific Revolution, allied with the fictions of capitalism and nationalism, harnessed this cooperative power to achieve planetary mastery.

This framework reframes the entirety of human history. It is no longer a simple story of technological advancement or political consolidation, but a history of consciousness itself. Harari's thesis suggests that what truly separates Sapiens from all other species, including other archaic humans, is a fundamental shift in how change occurs. For millions of years, behavioral patterns were tied to the slow, grinding pace of genetic evolution; changes in social structure required changes in DNA, or "hardware".7 The Cognitive Revolution, however, "declared its independence from biology".14 By enabling the creation of shared myths that are not genetically encoded, it allowed

Sapiens to rapidly alter their social structures—their cultural "software"—within decades or even years.6 This capacity for rapid, flexible adaptation, facilitated by rewritable narratives, is the core mechanism that propelled an insignificant ape to global dominance. The history of

Sapiens is the history of this software, its development, its deployment, and its ultimate, world-altering consequences.

The Cognitive Revolution and the Engine of History: Intersubjective Reality

The foundational event in Harari's historical framework is the Cognitive Revolution, a period he dates between roughly 70,000 and 30,000 years ago.10 This was not a revolution of tools or fire, but of the mind. It marks the point at which the history of

Homo sapiens diverged radically from the standard biological path, setting our species on a trajectory that would culminate in planetary dominion. The engine of this revolution, and indeed of all subsequent human history, was the emergence of a new and uniquely powerful form of language.

The "Tree of Knowledge" Mutation

Harari speculates that the Cognitive Revolution was triggered by a chance genetic mutation that rewired the internal structure of the Sapiens brain.7 While the precise biological mechanism remains unknown, its effect was profound: it gave rise to a language of unprecedented flexibility and complexity.15 This new linguistic capability was distinct for several reasons. It was, of course, a tool for describing the objective world with greater precision—communicating the location of predators or food sources.16 It also evolved as a potent instrument for social bonding through gossip, allowing individuals to maintain a detailed mental map of the social relationships within their band.2

However, the truly unique and revolutionary feature of Sapiens' language was its ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all.2 While other animals can communicate about the tangible ("Watch out for the lion!"), only

Sapiens can speak of the non-existent: the tribal ancestor spirit, the gods of the mountain, the modern nation-state, or the legal status of a corporation.15 This ability to create and communicate fictions is, for Harari, the secret to our success.

Defining the Intersubjective

To understand the power of these fictions, Harari introduces a critical distinction between three types of reality.4

1. Objective reality comprises things that exist independently of human consciousness or belief. Radioactivity, for instance, is an objective phenomenon; it existed long before it was discovered and would continue to exist even if all humans ceased to believe in it.8

2. Subjective reality consists of things that exist only in the consciousness of a single individual. A child's imaginary friend is a subjective reality; its existence is contingent on the belief of that one child and vanishes if that belief fades.8

3. Intersubjective reality is the crucial third category. These are phenomena that exist not in the material world or in a single mind, but within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals.4 Gods, nations, money, laws, and human rights are all intersubjective realities.19 They have no objective existence; you cannot find a "nation" or "human rights" in the physical world. Yet, they are not mere subjective illusions. Their power derives from the fact that millions or even billions of people collectively believe in them and act accordingly.9 As long as the collective belief persists, the intersubjective reality exerts immense force in the world.12

Breaking the Biological Barrier

This capacity for collective belief in fictions was the key that unlocked large-scale human cooperation. The social abilities of most animals are limited by what is known as Dunbar's number, which posits a cognitive limit to the size of a stable social group at around 150 individuals.6 Beyond this threshold, relationships can no longer be maintained through personal acquaintance and gossip.2

Sapiens broke this barrier by using shared myths as social glue. Two Catholics who have never met can embark on a crusade together, two Serbs can risk their lives for one another, and two lawyers can collaborate to defend a stranger because they believe in the same intersubjective realities: God, the Serbian nation, and the existence of law and justice, respectively.14 These shared stories create a bond of trust between countless strangers, enabling cooperation on a scale previously unimaginable in the natural world.23

Case Study: The Peugeot Corporation

Harari uses the modern limited liability company as a prime example of a powerful intersubjective fiction.9 He asks a simple question: in what sense does a company like Peugeot exist? It is not the sum of its physical assets; if all its cars were junked and its factories destroyed, the company would still exist and could raise capital to rebuild.20 It is not its employees or shareholders; they can all be replaced without the company ceasing to exist.20 Peugeot, Harari concludes, is a "legal fiction," an imagined entity that exists because lawyers and society at large agree to participate in the story of its existence.8 Yet this "figment of our imagination" can own property, borrow money, hire employees, and file lawsuits, demonstrating the tangible and overwhelming power that fictions wield in the modern world.9

The Cognitive Revolution, therefore, marks the point where cultural evolution began to outpace genetic evolution as the primary driver of human adaptation.2 The grand narrative of history that follows is not a story of changing bodies or brains, but of changing stories. The rise and fall of civilizations, the great religious movements, and the clash of political ideologies can all be understood as a vast, ongoing competition between different imagined orders. The most successful societies are not necessarily those with the bravest soldiers or the most ingenious tools, but those with the most compelling and effective stories—the myths that prove most capable of convincing millions of people to cooperate toward a common goal.

This framework, however, leads to a deeply paradoxical and unsettling conclusion. Harari repeatedly stresses that the most cherished values of modern liberal humanism—concepts like human rights, justice, and equality—have no basis in objective, biological reality.5 They are, in his terminology, fictions, no more real than the gods of ancient Sumer or the caste system of India.8 This creates a philosophical problem at the core of the book. If all these value systems are merely stories, with no objective foundation, then on what basis can one be judged as superior to another? As critics have pointed out, this radical relativism makes it difficult to substantively condemn any ethical position, no matter how morally repugnant.19 The implication is that Harari's historical analysis is fundamentally functionalist. A myth's value is measured not by its truth or moral content, but by its utility in fostering large-scale cooperation. This pragmatic, and perhaps amoral, lens is one of the book's most challenging and controversial aspects.

The Architecture of Global Unity: Money, Empire, and Religion

Following the Cognitive Revolution, human history, as Harari narrates it, is characterized by a relentless trend toward unification. Over millennia, thousands of small, isolated human cultures have gradually coalesced into the single global civilization of today.6 This process was driven by three great universal "imagined orders," each a powerful testament to the ability of intersubjective reality to transcend local loyalties and create systems of cooperation on a planetary scale: money, empire, and universal religion.8

Money: The Ultimate Fiction of Trust

Harari describes the invention of money as a "purely intellectual revolution".6 Before money, complex economies were limited by the inefficiencies of barter or the social obligations of favor-based systems.18 Money solved this problem by creating an intermediary of exchange that has no intrinsic value. A dollar bill or a bit of electronic data is worthless in itself; its value is a psychological construct, sustained by the shared, circular belief that other people will accept it in exchange for tangible goods and services.4

This makes money "the most universal and pluralistic system of mutual trust ever devised".1 It is the ultimate social lubricant, enabling cooperation between individuals who do not know, like, or trust one another on any other basis.1 A Christian and a Muslim who might be willing to kill each other over religious dogma will happily use the same currency to conduct business. In this sense, money is the most successful story ever told—a fiction so universally accepted that it bridges every cultural, political, and religious divide, uniting the entire globe into a single market.8

Empire: The Political Unifier

For most of the last 2,500 years, the most common form of political organization has been the empire.1 Harari presents empires as massive engines of cultural amalgamation. While acknowledging their legacy of violence, oppression, and exploitation, he argues that they played a crucial role in unifying humankind.6 By conquering diverse peoples and incorporating them into a single political entity, empires spread common languages, laws, norms, and technologies over vast territories.6

The legacy of these imperial fictions often outlasted the empires themselves. The Roman Empire collapsed, but its legal and linguistic concepts continued to shape Europe for centuries. British imperial rule has ended, but English remains a global language, and democratic ideals are debated worldwide. In Harari's view, empires were brutal but effective unifiers, forcibly erasing local distinctions and weaving disparate cultures into larger and more complex tapestries, laying the institutional and cultural groundwork for today's globalized world.1

Religion: The Cosmic Unifier

The third great unifier was the emergence of universal religions, particularly Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam.8 Before their appearance, most religions were local and exclusive. The gods of a particular tribe or city had little interest in the affairs of foreigners. Universal religions, by contrast, were missionary in nature. They advanced the revolutionary idea that there was a single, superhuman order governing the entire universe and that this order was applicable to all people, everywhere.8 For the first time, all of humanity could be imagined as a single unit of potential believers, erasing the fundamental evolutionary division of "us" versus "them".8

These religions provided a cosmic legitimacy to the fragile imagined orders of society. By grounding human laws and social hierarchies in a divine, eternal truth, they made these constructs appear natural and unassailable, thereby stabilizing vast and complex social systems.19

The process of unification driven by these three forces was, however, fundamentally amoral. Harari is unflinching in his descriptions of the suffering caused by imperial conquest, religious persecution, and the exploitative dynamics of capitalism.6 Yet, he simultaneously presents these forces as the primary engines of the historical trend toward global unity, which he terms the "arrow of history".6 The success of an imagined order, in this analysis, is measured by its capacity to spread and organize human populations, not by the happiness or well-being it generates for individuals. This reinforces a central theme of the book: the persistent and often tragic disconnect between the evolutionary success of the collective and the lived experience of the individual.

Furthermore, Harari makes a powerful analytical move by expanding the definition of "religion" beyond theism to encompass any system of human norms and values founded on a belief in a superhuman order.19 This allows him to classify modern secular ideologies like liberalism, communism, humanism, and, most notably, capitalism as "natural-law religions".1 This re-categorization suggests that the modern world is not post-religious. Instead, it is dominated by new faiths that have simply replaced supernatural gods with abstract, superhuman laws—the "invisible hand" of the market, the sanctity of "human rights," or the inexorable march of "history." This reveals a deep continuity in the cognitive structure of human societies. From the Stone Age to the Silicon Age, we remain creatures governed by faith in imagined orders; we have merely swapped one pantheon of myths for another.

The Narrative Arc of the Revolutions: Progress or Peril?

Within Harari's grand narrative, the Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions serve as pivotal turning points. They are not depicted as straightforward chapters in a story of human progress. Instead, they are presented as complex, often paradoxical events that dramatically amplified humanity's collective power while simultaneously raising profound questions about individual well-being and happiness. Each revolution was both enabled by and a catalyst for the expansion of imagined realities, pushing Homo sapiens further along a path of increasing power and entanglement.

The Agricultural Revolution: "History's Biggest Fraud"

Harari's analysis of the Agricultural Revolution, which began around 12,000 years ago, is one of the book's most provocative and counter-intuitive arguments. He labels it "history's biggest fraud".1 The conventional story of this era is one of human ingenuity leading to a more stable and prosperous life. Harari dismantles this narrative, arguing that the shift from foraging to farming was a "luxury trap" that, for the vast majority of individuals, led to a significant decline in quality of life.12

The trap was baited with the promise of more food and greater security. However, this promise was a fiction. While agriculture did increase the total amount of food available per unit of territory, this surplus did not translate into a better diet or more leisure time for the average person.17 Instead, it fueled a population explosion.17 The extra food was consumed by more mouths, and the average farmer had to work far harder than the average forager, subsisting on a much less varied and less nutritious diet of staple crops like wheat or rice.9 This led to a host of new ailments, from slipped disks and arthritis caused by grueling labor to widespread disease fostered by dense, unhygienic settlements.28 Life became more anxious, dominated by worries about drought, blight, and raids.9

Once humanity fell into this trap, there was no escape. The exponential population growth made a return to foraging impossible; the land could no longer support so many people with the old lifestyle.29 Harari employs a powerful rhetorical inversion to capture this dynamic, arguing that it was not

Sapiens who domesticated wheat, but wheat that domesticated Sapiens.1 Our species, which had evolved for a life of roaming and varied activity, became biologically and socially tethered to the relentless, seasonal demands of a few plant species.30 The revolution also had catastrophic consequences for other animals. The process of domestication, founded on brutal practices, led to the suffering of billions of creatures, a situation Harari describes as "probably the worst crime in history".1

The Scientific Revolution: The Myth of Admitting Ignorance

The Scientific Revolution, beginning approximately 500 years ago, represents another fundamental shift in the human story. Harari frames it not as a revolution of knowledge, but as a "revolution of ignorance".33 Premodern traditions of knowledge, such as religion and philosophy, were built on the assumption that everything important about the world was already known, contained within ancient texts or divine revelations.9 The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the admission of collective ignorance—the acceptance of the Latin injunction

ignoramus, meaning "we do not know".10

This new story—the myth of our own ignorance—created a powerful moral and practical imperative to seek out new knowledge through empirical observation and the language of mathematics.9 However, science on its own is incapable of setting priorities or funding its own expensive research.18 Its explosive success came from its alliance with two other powerful imagined orders: European imperialism and capitalism.7 Imperialism, with its hunger for new territories and resources, funded voyages of discovery that simultaneously expanded scientific knowledge and colonial power. Capitalism, with its creed of perpetual growth, invested in scientific research with the expectation of generating new profits. This "marriage of science and empire," fueled by the capitalist belief in progress, unleashed the unprecedented power that enabled European global domination and reshaped the world.10

Yet, just as with the Agricultural Revolution, Harari questions whether this explosion of power has translated into an increase in human happiness. While modern medicine has conquered many diseases and industrial production has created immense material wealth, it is not clear that the average person today is significantly happier than their ancestors.1 Modern life is often characterized by alienation, stress, and the psychological burden of ever-increasing expectations.9

This persistent divergence between collective power and individual well-being is a central paradox of Harari's narrative. Each revolution represents a kind of "ratchet effect." An imagined order—the story of a better life—prompts material changes in the world, such as population growth or technological dependency. These material changes then lock humanity into the new order, making a return to the previous state impossible.6 History, in this telling, is a series of one-way doors, each opened by a compelling fiction, each leading to a reality that is more complex and powerful, but not necessarily better for the individuals living within it.

Table 1: Harari's Three Great Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis

Feature

Cognitive Revolution

Agricultural Revolution

Scientific Revolution

Timeframe

c. 70,000 years ago

c. 12,000 years ago

c. 500 years ago

Core Innovation

Fictive Language

Domestication of Plants & Animals

The Scientific Method

Governing "Myth"

Tribal/Spiritual Myths

The Promise of an Easier Life

The Admission of Ignorance & Myth of Progress

Impact on Sapiens' Power (Collective)

Enabled large-scale cooperation; Jumped to top of food chain.

Enabled massive population growth and complex societies (cities, kingdoms).

Enabled global domination, harnessing of immense energy, mastery over nature.

Impact on Individual Well-being (Harari's View)

Ambiguous; likely more stimulating and varied lives than farmers.

Overwhelmingly negative: harder work, poorer diet, more disease, increased anxiety.

Ambiguous/Negative: Increased material wealth but no clear increase in happiness; alienation, stress.

The End of Homo Sapiens: The Animal That Became God

The final and most speculative section of Sapiens extrapolates the trajectory of the Scientific Revolution to its logical and startling conclusion. Harari argues that we are standing at a historical precipice, where the very forces that made us human are poised to transform us into something entirely new. The narrative arc of the book comes full circle: the animal that began its journey by imagining gods is now on the verge of becoming one, wielding the powers of creation and destruction once reserved for mythology.1 This apotheosis marks the potential end of

Homo sapiens and the end of history as we know it.

From Natural Selection to Intelligent Design

The most fundamental shift Harari foresees is the end of the 4-billion-year reign of natural selection as the primary engine of life's evolution.36 For eons, all organisms, from amoebas to humans, were shaped by the blind forces of genetic mutation and environmental pressure. This era is now closing. It is being superseded by the era of intelligent design.36 This is not the intelligent design of a supernatural creator, but the intelligent design of human creators, operating through our own technological "clouds"—the data centers and research labs of Google, IBM, and their successors.36 Harari outlines three primary pathways through which this transformation will occur 38:

1. Biological Engineering: This involves the direct, deliberate manipulation of the human genome. Through technologies like genetic engineering, it will become possible to rewrite our own biological code, enhancing cognitive abilities, extending lifespans, or altering physical traits.38 Harari suggests that there are no insurmountable technical barriers to creating "superhumans," with the main obstacles being ethical and political rather than scientific.38

2. Cyborg Engineering: This pathway involves the merging of organic bodies with inorganic, non-biological components. This spectrum runs from contemporary bionic limbs and cochlear implants to the more revolutionary prospect of a direct, two-way brain-computer interface.38 Such an interface would allow for the seamless exchange of information between the human brain and digital networks, potentially leading to the creation of collective consciousness and fundamentally altering concepts of self, memory, and identity.38

3. The Engineering of Inorganic Life: The most radical pathway is the creation of completely non-organic life forms, principally Artificial Intelligence (AI). These entities, initially designed by humans, could evolve independently, unbound by the limitations of organic chemistry.38 Harari speculates that this could lead to the decoupling of intelligence from consciousness.36 The planet could come to be dominated by entities of super-intelligence that possess no subjective experience, no feelings, and no consciousness at all.36

The Gilgamesh Project and the New Human Agenda

This technological trajectory is not occurring in a vacuum; it is driven by the dominant "religion" of the modern era: humanism. Having largely overcome the traditional scourges of famine, plague, and war, humankind has set for itself a new, more ambitious agenda.41 The new goals are the conquest of the last remaining enemies of human desire: old age, suffering, and death itself.42

Harari terms the scientific quest for immortality "the Gilgamesh Project," after the ancient Sumerian hero who sought eternal life.34 This project, alongside the pursuit of boundless happiness (bliss) and the divine power of creation (divinity), now forms the implicit purpose of the scientific-capitalist engine.41 We are no longer content to merely understand the world; we seek to re-engineer it, and ourselves, to fit our desires.

The Final Prophecy: "History will end when humans become gods."

This speculative future represents the culmination of the entire narrative of Sapiens. The Cognitive Revolution gave humans the ability to imagine gods, creating the intersubjective realities needed for large-scale cooperation. The Agricultural Revolution created complex societies that were stabilized and legitimized by the authority of these imagined gods. The Scientific Revolution, by systematically dismantling the old religious myths, dethroned the gods and placed humanity itself at the center of the universe. Now, in the final act, the technologies born of the Scientific Revolution are endowing Sapiens with the very powers once attributed to the gods: the creation of life through bioengineering, the promise of eternal life through the Gilgamesh Project, and a semblance of omniscience through big data algorithms.35

This apotheosis, however, is presented as the ultimate "luxury trap." The pursuit of god-like abilities, driven by the humanist myth of empowering individuals, threatens to create outcomes that could destroy humanistic values. It could lead to unprecedented social and biological inequality, splitting humanity into a caste of upgraded "superhumans" and a "useless class" of the un-enhanced.40 The quest for happiness could result in a world of pharmacologically managed but meaningless existence.9 The very pursuit of divinity may render

Homo sapiens obsolete.

The book concludes not with a triumphant vision of human destiny, but with a deeply unsettling question that encapsulates its core ambivalence about the nature of progress: "Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?".5 Having achieved unimaginable power, humanity finds itself with no clear purpose or direction, possessing the tools of creation but lacking the wisdom to wield them responsibly. The story of

Sapiens is thus a cautionary tale, a powerful narrative designed to force a collective contemplation of the future we are creating. In this sense, the book itself becomes an example of its own thesis: it is a compelling story, an imagined reality, introduced into the global consciousness with the aim of making millions of strangers cooperate—or at least think—about the profound challenge of our self-made divinity.

Synthesis and Critical Assessment

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has achieved a level of global influence rare for a work of non-fiction. Its success is a testament to its ambitious scope and Harari's remarkable ability to synthesize vast fields of knowledge into a single, compelling narrative. The book is widely praised for its "unforgettably vivid language" and its "dazzlingly bold" approach, offering readers a powerful and accessible framework for understanding the entire sweep of human history.1 For many, it is a revelatory work that connects disparate historical events into a coherent and thought-provoking whole.3 However, this very accessibility and narrative neatness are also the source of significant criticism from the academic community.

Academic and Methodological Critiques

The most persistent criticism leveled against Sapiens, particularly from specialists in anthropology and archaeology, is that it frequently presents highly speculative or controversial academic theories as established facts.22 Concepts like the specific "Tree of Knowledge" mutation that supposedly triggered the Cognitive Revolution, or the precise cognitive limit of Dunbar's number, are treated as foundational truths rather than contested hypotheses.22 Critics argue that the book originated as a freshman-level survey course and retains a tendency to create a "big fluffy narrative" that is not always rigorously supported by the underlying evidence.47

This leads to a related charge of oversimplification and reductivism. In its effort to paint a history of everything in a few hundred pages, the book inevitably "whitewashes all the complexity out of human history".48 Nuance is often sacrificed for the sake of a clean, linear narrative. This approach has led some to label the book a "spiritual successor" to Jared Diamond's

Guns, Germs, and Steel, another work celebrated for its broad scope but criticized for its deterministic and reductive arguments.47 Some anthropologists have dismissed the work as "vibe anthropology," authored by a historian with no formal training in the field, leading to a reliance on "just so" stories from evolutionary psychology and even factual errors, such as a reference to non-existent mutualism between chimpanzees and cheetahs.47

Philosophical Critiques

Beyond methodological concerns, Sapiens has also drawn criticism for its philosophical underpinnings. Many find Harari's framework to be "eerily nihilistic".24 His central thesis—that our most cherished values like justice, human rights, and equality are "fictions" or "myths" with no objective reality—is seen by some as a dangerous form of moral relativism.19 If there is no objective basis for these values, then there is no firm ground from which to condemn atrocities like genocide or to argue for the inherent superiority of a liberal democracy over a tyrannical regime.19 Harari's assertion that, from a biological perspective, "nothing is unnatural" and that whatever is possible is by definition natural, is viewed as a frightening ethical philosophy that could be used to justify any action, no matter how horrifying.4

Final Synthesis: A Modern Myth

In the final analysis, the most effective way to understand Sapiens is not as a definitive academic textbook, but as a powerful and profoundly influential modern myth. This is not to dismiss it as false, but to recognize it in the very terms it uses to analyze history. The book is a masterful work of storytelling that organizes an immense volume of information into a coherent narrative, giving meaning to our collective past and offering a stark, provocative vision of our potential future.

Its greatest strengths and its most significant flaws both stem from this quality. It simplifies and speculates to create a compelling plot. It presents a clear protagonist (Homo sapiens), a central conflict (the struggle for dominance), and a dramatic, open-ended conclusion (the apotheosis into gods). In doing so, it fulfills the primary function of a myth as defined within its own pages: it provides a shared story that allows millions of strangers to think about and cooperate on the most significant challenges of our time. The book's global success is perhaps the ultimate validation of its own thesis—that in the history of Sapiens, nothing is more powerful than a good story.

Works cited

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