In Harari’s book, around 70,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens were the last species of human left on this planet. With no competition of different human species, Homo Sapiens were able to start the “Cognitive Revolution”. This lead Homo Sapiens to be able to learn how to hunt better and advance the quality of their societies. With the creation of fire, we were now able to cook raw meats that we could digest easier. The Agricultural Revolution was dated around 12,000 years ago. This revolution started a new way of society for Humans. With the coming of the Agricultural revolution, the status of hunter and gathers become more and more nonexistent. Humans were able to create their own pastures where they could grow their own crops instead of going out of their communities to scavenge for food. With the advancements of agriculture, larger communities were able to grow and flourish. Human population started to rise because of the safety that these larger communities provided.
With Imaginative orders, this helped the start of writing and beliefs. The only ways to keep certain imaginative orders through future generations was to write down whatever the certain imaginative order was. This started general languages that helped future generations understand the writings and even to communicate to each other more efficiently. I believe that Homo sapiens became dominant in this world because we were able to create larger communities that were able to keep people safe and fed. This allowed the population to spike and the general well being of homo sapiens to increase.
I think a VERY important aspect of the cognitive revolution that you missed was that it was the capacity for imagination (ie creating fictions) which allowed for Sapiens to become the biggest, and only, Homo group on the planet. This imagination allowed for people to come together in bigger groups and cooperate with the use of a shared fiction. Other Homo groups weren’t capable of this. The cognitive revolution was not harnessing fire or “hunt better” though those things did happen.
It also can’t be said that these agricultural societies were necessarily safer- if something happened to a crop, everyone starved. Also, illness was far more prominent due to lack of variety in the diet. What it did allow, was a population explosion because it could produce a surplus of calories in the right circumstances.
Writing was an important development, but came a lot later than these other revolutions, and happened as a result of the cognitive revolutions ability to support very large groups of people working together. The societies were too large for one person to remember what everyone owed in taxes, so the first writing, a simply type of notation, was created for that purpose.