Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Sapiens is a book by Yuval Noah Harari.  It is a short history of the human species from its time as hunter-gatherers on the African savannah into modern times and a little beyond.  I highly recommend it to anybody interested in how got here.

I will not try to summarize what he wrote.  However, one thing that really stood out for me when I read the book is just how murderous our species is to other species.

Scientists agree that we are currently experiencing a mass extinction in the world.  They even call it the 6th mass extinction.  The evidence to support this is very compelling but one of the things that is misleading about it is science gives the impression that it is a recent phenomenon.  That is, it has only been going on for a few decades or a couple of centuries at the most.  Essentially, since humans discovered industrialization and science.

Dr. Harari points out that in actual fact the mass extinction began over 70,000 years ago when Homo sapiens began to move out of their ancestral home in the African savannah to all parts of the globe.  Dr. Harari points out that whenever Sapiens showed up in a certain part of the globe animals, plants, birds and other wildlife began to die off.  

Whole species of animals, large and small, went extinct, usually just centuries after the arrival of Homo sapiens.  This includes other species humans such as Homo rudolfensis, Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis.  In Africa, Asia, North and South American and Australia, whenever Homo sapiens showed up, native living species died off.  The evidence is compelling that the causes of these extinctions was human activity.  There does not appear to be any malice intended, although that could be debatable with regard to the other extinct human species, it was just ignorance and lack of awareness of our ancesters about their impact on the world around them.

So, the mass extinction that we are witnessing today began 70,000 years ago as our ancestors spread around the world.  It had been slow and steady throughout those 1000s of years but in the last couple of hundred it has accelerated as we harnassed science to do our bidding.  

Our ability to change the environment around us to meet our needs and our encroachment into areas of the planet that were inaccessible just a few centuries ago has been a death sentence for thousands of species in the world and it continues to be so as time goes by.  

This fact was a revelation to me when I read it in Dr. Harari's book.  Up until then I always believed that the mass extinction was a recent phenomenon but now I am aware that it has been going on for 10s of thousands of years.  It puts a different perspective on it.

When I believed that it was a recent phenomenon I believed that we would be able to stop it.  I reasoned that since we only started it a couple of centuries ago we could change our behaviour and stop it.  I no longer believe that.  I no longer believe the current mass extinction can be stopped.  Although I am saddened by it I now believe the continuation of the current mass extinction is inevitable.  It is just not in our power to prevent it.  The simple fact is we as a species are a walking death sentence to our fellow creatures, particularly those in the wild, we always have been and we will continue to be so until we kill off most of the life on this planet or the planet decides that a major correction is necessary and we join those species on the extinction list.  

Some would argue that we have evolved to the point where we should be able to stop the mass extinction.  I do not believe that and you only need to see what is happening in the world to see that I have reasons for my doubts.  We know what we are doing to our planet but not enough of us care enough to gather up the collective will to put a stop to it.  The simple fact is we have not evolved that much in the last 2 million years.  You take someone from downtown Ottawa and plunk them down into a hunter-gatherer society a million years in the past and, except for the lifestyle, our ancestors would be recognizable by our modern city dweller.

So, although I believe we still need to fight the good fight to stop the mass extinction I believe that we should also be resigned to the fact that it is a fight we cannot win.  Maybe by some miracle Sapiens will suddenly change their ways but I do not believe that will happen.  It is sad to see the destruction of species that I grew up learning about in elementary and secondary school but I no longer believe that there is anything we can do to stop it.

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