Sapiens

Sapiens is your guide to becoming an expert on the entire history of the human race as it reviews everything our species has been through from ancient ancestors to our dominating place in the world today.

Homo sapiens had some distinct advantages that let them get ahead of other human species on earth. Most importantly are the differences in humans brains. These began with the Cognitive Revolution around 70,000 years ago. This was a time when mental development rose relatively suddenly, setting our ancient ancestors apart.

With their newfound better brains, Homo sapiens could outperform other species of humans. Forming communities, developing better hunting tools, and building simple trade networks made everything about life and survival easier.

As the ability to communicate grew, so did the population. Language set our species apart from others because it made us able to distribute information more freely. This helped early people share lessons about predators and food with each other. Because humans could cooperate as a society and flexibly, ideas spread which made even more progress possible.

Not long later, the Agricultural Revolution gave humans another great advantage. By deserting old hunting and gathering methods for farming, mankind further improved their situation. This new method, although slow to begin, was far more efficient than the old ways, and let population growth explode.

Things were looking up but there was a problem. Coping with this larger community would require mankind to make even more advances to get to where we are today.

With agriculture, humans became more efficient with their time and energy. This let some people begin doing other work like weaving or blacksmithing. These individuals would then trade or barter with farmers, exchanging their goods for food. While this new system was better, it quickly became inefficient. Let’s imagine that you’re living at the time and you’ve chosen blacksmithing as your profession. Your assortment of knives and swords provide good means to trade for food, like pork. Seems easy enough to just make the trade. But what if the farmer in your town already has a knife? Or maybe he’s not got a pig to kill for you yet. He can promise you one, but how do you know he’ll be honest about it? It’s easy to see how having writing and money would make your situation a lot better. With the ability to record your transaction with the farmer, you can make sure he keeps his word if he needs to promise you a pig. And if you don’t have anything he needs, you can just sell your knife for currency, like barley, to make the transaction. From here, advancements for Homo sapiens began happening rapidly. Pretty soon laws helped regulate…