Wyatt Ayers
9/17/2018
Cognitive and the Agricultural revolutions played major roles in how humans became into being “top dog” on Earth. Harari thinks that we were able to expand our minds by cooking our food and sparing energy that was once needed for our intestines. This newfound energy was put into our brains, growing and getting more efficient. With bigger and better brains, we were somehow able to come up with a language better than any before. Some call it “The Tree of Knowledge” mutation that allowed us to think with more depth and understanding, scientists don’t know what happened 70,000 – 40,000 but we began to master advanced language skills. Therefore, we were able to explain the world around ourselves in extreme detail.
There are a few different ideas about how Homo sapiens became dominant over their counterparts, the most common idea is that we were simply better at gathering food than our ancestors and were therefore able to survive better. As much as I want to believe everything Harari states, it’s hard for me to accept it. There was no written language to record any of this, no word of mouth. Just an educated guess in what scientist think happened. It was interesting to hear about the other types of humans, especially the smaller people with limited food. I think homo sapiens became dominant because we had a language that explained more to each other than “look out, danger”. This gave a group a sociological bonding and allowed larger, more advanced villages.
Wyatt-
Nice post. After reading Harari, I also found myself wanting to believe whatever he said. He presented things so well and everything sounded so accurate and logically. Although these hypothesis about what happened may be logically, I also found it hard to just accept everything. It is hard to fully commit to believing something when you are not really given a solid piece of evidence, but instead a guess. It makes perfect sense that the species that was able to hunt and forage in a more advanced way would thrive, and the others would die off, but that is still just an educated guess. But, we do know that our language evolved, perhaps to the “Tree of Knowledge” mutation, and our language was more advanced. I agree that that is probably the reason that we became the dominant species. We were able to warn each other after a lion we saw by the river, or tell each other which trees produced the best fruit. Other species could not compete with that. What do you think would have happened had we not had that mutation?