The Abuses of Prehistory

Our prehistoric ancestors never went away. This is what Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari argued in his international blockbuster Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015), which claimed to uncover our species’ most important characteristics. In Harari’s telling, our brains were shaped in the era of hunter-gatherers and showed little change thereafter. The emergence of language, social hierarchies, and new technologies did little to update who we are: assemblies of raw impulses that always seek food and comfort.