The cognitive revolution happened around 70,000 and is when humans essentially gained imagination and became able to understand as well as create fictional ideas. The agricultural revolution happened around 10,000 years ago and was when humans transitioned from being hunter gatherers to domesticating animals and plants. Imagination was important to the advancement of humans because it allowed us to create abstract concepts such as money and government that were beneficial to our survival and domination. Domesticating plants and animal, while decreasing the nutritional value of the human diet, created a surplus of food allowing some people to not focus on only producing food but to make advances in science and technology.
Harari’s theory of how sapiens became dominant is all based around the idea of how we communicate and work together. He makes a comparison between how humans work together and how bees work together. While bees have vast social networks similar to humans, they don’t have the flexibility in their social network that we do. Our social network has flexibility that allows for changes that can happen if enough people agree with the change. Another comparison is made between how we communicate and how other primates such as chimps communicate. While chimps social network has flexibility, it lacks the sheer number of individuals that communicate with each other. The fact that humans can communicate and share ideas with millions of others allows for more people getting more ideas and improving on those ideas. Harari then goes on to say that the reason we can have these means of communication is because of the cognitive revolution that allowed us to imagine. While i agree with most of harari’s theory, I believe that the bigger reason we were able to make these complex communication networks is because of the diversity and complexity of our language. Our language allowed us to express more complex ideas, such as imaginary ideas but goes far beyond that.