The cognitive revolution is argued to be the beginning of what researchers call modern cognition, Harari states that “the appearance of news ways of thinking and communicating between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive revolution” (Harari,21). The greatest cognitive upgrade was the ability for humans to communicate with each other more effectively. Though many animals have signs that they can communicate with each other, Harari notes that “… language is amazingly supple. We can connect a limited number of sounds and signs to produce an infinite number of sentences…” (Harari, 22). With the wide variety of sounds, it transformed the way that our early relatives lived their lives. The agricultural revolution was that “about 10,000 years ago, when Sapiens began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of few animal and plant species, (Harari, 77). This revolution created a distinction within group size as the nomadic hunter-gatherers became static within one place and settled down causing the population to increase even greater.
Harari states that the reason humans became so dominant was due to our ability to manipulate the environment. He notes that “Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers…” (Harari, 25). Homo sapiens ability to communicate was rapid, causing the environment to not be able to check our abilities as it did with other predators, such as the lion. I think that this argument heavily relies on the fact that these revolutions occurred in a rapid succession rather than an evolution. I think we became more dominant because of the cognitive and agricultural skills, but that we developed the processes rather than just a revolution of culture.
For starters, nice blog post. Super clever title. It was well thought out, and well written. In the first paragraph, you explained the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions really well, and you employed quotes from the book really well. The second paragraph was also really well. I liked that you took a different approach to why Homo sapiens became dominant then the advanced language and genetic mutations. I don’t think I picked up on the outsmarting the environment aspect. Very insightful, and as I think about the environment more, I think it makes more and more sense. However, I don’t believe that the argument relies on the rapid succession of those revolutions. Mostly because those revolutions, at least to me, were an evolution because of both the amount of time between each revolution and the fact that both revolutions were so pivotal in the history of the human race.