Sapiens pdf download

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It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. Loneliness and privacy were rare. Neighbouring bands probably competed for resources and even fought one another, but they also had friendly contacts.

They exchanged members, hunted together, traded rare luxuries, cemented political alliances and celebrated religious festivals. Such cooperation was one of the important trademarks of Homo sapiens, and gave it a crucial edge over other human species.

Sometimes relations with neighbouring bands were tight enough that together they constituted a single tribe, sharing a common language, common myths, and common norms and values. Yet we should not overestimate the importance of such external relations. Even if in times of crisis neighbouring bands drew closer together, and even if they occasionally gathered to hunt or feast together, they still spent the vast majority of their time in complete isolation and independence.

Trade was mostly limited to prestige items such as shells, amber and pigments. There is no evidence that people traded staple goods like fruits and meat, or that the existence of one band depended on the importing of goods from another. Sociopolitical relations, too, tended to be sporadic.

The tribe did not serve as a permanent political framework, and even if it had seasonal meeting places, there were no permanent towns or institutions. The average person lived many months without seeing or hearing a human from outside of her own band, and she encountered throughout her life no more than a few hundred humans. The Sapiens population was thinly spread over vast territories. First pet?

A 12,year-old tomb found in northern Israel. It contains the skeleton of a fifty-year-old woman next to that of a puppy bottom left corner. Her left hand is resting on the dog in a way that might indicate an emotional connection. There are, of course, other possible explanations. Perhaps, for example, the puppy was a gift to the gatekeeper of the next world. Most Sapiens bands lived on the road, roaming from place to place in search of food. Their movements were in uenced by the changing seasons, the annual migrations of animals and the growth cycles of plants.

They usually travelled back and forth across the same home territory, an area of between several dozen and many hundreds of square kilometres. Occasionally, bands wandered outside their turf and explored new lands, whether due to natural calamities, violent con icts, demographic pressures or the initiative of a charismatic leader. These wanderings were the engine of human worldwide expansion. If a forager band split once every forty years and its splinter group migrated to a new territory a hundred kilometres to the east, the distance from East Africa to China would have been covered in about 10, years.

In some exceptional cases, when food sources were particularly rich, bands settled down in seasonal and even permanent camps. Techniques for drying, smoking and freezing food also made it possible to stay put for longer periods.

Most importantly, alongside seas and rivers rich in seafood and waterfowl, humans set up permanent shing villages — the rst permanent settlements in history, long predating the Agricultural Revolution. Fishing villages might have appeared on the coasts of Indonesian islands as early as 45, years ago.

These may have been the base from which Homo sapiens launched its rst transoceanic enterprise: the invasion of Australia. In most habitats, Sapiens bands fed themselves in an elastic and opportunistic fashion. They scrounged for termites, picked berries, dug for roots, stalked rabbits and hunted bison and mammoth. Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well. To survive, they needed a detailed mental map of their territory. To maximise the e ciency of their daily search for food, they required information about the growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each animal.

They needed to know which foods were nourishing, which made you sick, and how to use others as cures. They needed to know the progress of the seasons and what warning signs preceded a thunderstorm or a dry spell.

Each individual had to understand how to make a stone knife, how to mend a torn cloak, how to lay a rabbit trap, and how to face avalanches, snakebites or hungry lions.

Mastery of each of these many skills required years of apprenticeship and practice. The average ancient forager could turn a int stone into a spear point within minutes. When we try to imitate this feat, we usually fail miserably. Most of us lack expert knowledge of the aking properties of int and basalt and the fine motor skills needed to work them precisely.

In other words, the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker?

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging.

You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker. Foragers mastered not only the surrounding world of animals, plants and objects, but also the internal world of their own bodies and senses. They listened to the slightest movement in the grass to learn whether a snake might be lurking there. They carefully observed the foliage of trees in order to discover fruits, beehives and bird nests.

They moved with a minimum of e ort and noise, and knew how to sit, walk and run in the most agile and e cient manner. Varied and constant use of their bodies made them as t as marathon runners. The hunter-gatherer way of life di ered signi cantly from region to region and from season to season, but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, labourers and office clerks who followed in their footsteps.

They hunt only one day out of three, and gathering takes up just three to six hours daily. In normal times, this is enough to feed the band. It may well be that ancient hunter-gatherers living in zones more fertile than the Kalahari spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials.

On top of that, foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores. They had no dishes to wash, no carpets to vacuum, no floors to polish, no nappies to change and no bills to pay.

The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do. Today, a Chinese factory hand leaves home around seven in the morning, makes her way through polluted streets to a sweatshop, and there operates the same machine, in the same way, day in, day out, for ten long and mind-numbing hours, returning home around seven in the evening in order to wash dishes and do the laundry.

Thirty thousand years ago, a Chinese forager might leave camp with her companions at, say, eight in the morning. By early afternoon, they were back at the camp to make lunch. That left them plenty of time to gossip, tell stories, play with the children and just hang out.

In most places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition. That is hardly surprising — this had been the human diet for hundreds of thousands of years, and the human body was well adapted to it. Evidence from fossilised skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to su er from starvation or malnutrition, and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant descendants. Average life expectancy was apparently just thirty to forty years, but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality.

Children who made it through the perilous rst years had a good chance of reaching the age of sixty, and some even made it to their eighties. Among modern foragers, forty- ve-year- old women can expect to live another twenty years, and about 5—8 per cent of the population is over sixty. Farmers tend to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet. Especially in premodern times, most of the calories feeding an agricultural population came from a single crop — such as wheat, potatoes or rice — that lacks some of the vitamins, minerals and other nutritional materials humans need.

The typical peasant in traditional China ate rice for breakfast, rice for lunch, and rice for dinner. If she were lucky, she could expect to eat the same on the following day. Tomorrows menu might have been completely di erent.

This variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all the necessary nutrients. Furthermore, by not being dependent on any single kind of food, they were less liable to su er when one particular food source failed. Agricultural societies are ravaged by famine when drought, re or earthquake devastates the annual rice or potato crop. Forager societies were hardly immune to natural disasters, and su ered from periods of want and hunger, but they were usually able to deal with such calamities more easily.

If they lost some of their staple foodstu s, they could gather or hunt other species, or move to a less affected area. Ancient foragers also su ered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution.

Ancient foragers, who had domesticated only dogs, were free of these scourges. Moreover, most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic permanent settlements — ideal hotbeds for disease. Foragers roamed the land in small bands that could not sustain epidemics.

It would be a mistake, however, to idealise the lives of these ancients. Though they lived better lives than most people in agricultural and industrial societies, their world could still be harsh and unforgiving. Periods of want and hardship were not uncommon, child mortality was high, and an accident which would be minor today could easily become a death sentence. Most people probably enjoyed the close intimacy of the roaming band, but those unfortunates who incurred the hostility or mockery of their fellow band members probably su ered terribly.

Modern foragers occasionally abandon and even kill old or disabled people who cannot keep up with the band. Unwanted babies and children may be slain, and there are even cases of religiously inspired human sacrifice.

He was left under a tree. But the man recuperated, and, walking briskly, he managed to rejoin the band. I used to kill my aunts … The women were afraid of me … Now, here with the whites, I have become weak. One woman recalled that her rst baby girl was killed because the men in the band did not want another girl. Anthropologists who lived with them for years report that violence between adults was very rare. Both women and men were free to change partners at will.

They smiled and laughed constantly, had no leadership hierarchy, and generally shunned domineering people. They were extremely generous with their few possessions, and were not obsessed with success or wealth. The things they valued most in life were good social interactions and high-quality friendships.

We should beware of demonising or idealising it on the basis of a super cial acquaintance. So, too, were the ancient hunter-gatherers. Talking Ghosts What can we say about the spiritual and mental life of the ancient hunter- gatherers? The basics of the forager economy can be reconstructed with some con dence based on quanti able and objective factors. For example, we can calculate how many calories per day a person needed in order to survive, how many calories were obtained from a kilogram of walnuts, and how many walnuts could be gathered from a square kilometre of forest.

But did they consider walnuts a delicacy or a humdrum staple? Did they believe that walnut trees were inhabited by spirits? Did they nd walnut leaves pretty? If a forager boy wanted to take a forager girl to a romantic spot, did the shade of a walnut tree su ce? The world of thought, belief and feeling is by de nition far more difficult to decipher.

Most scholars agree that animistic beliefs were common among ancient foragers. Thus, animists may believe that the big rock at the top of the hill has desires and needs. The rock might be angry about something that people did and rejoice over some other action. The rock might admonish people or ask for favours. Humans, for their part, can address the rock, to mollify or threaten it.

Not only the rock, but also the oak tree at the bottom of the hill is an animated being, and so is the stream owing below the hill, the spring in the forest clearing, the bushes growing around it, the path to the clearing, and the field mice, wolves and crows that drink there.

In the animist world, objects and living things are not the only animated beings. There are also immaterial entities — the spirits of the dead, and friendly and malevolent beings, the kind that we today call demons, fairies and angels. Animists believe that there is no barrier between humans and other beings. They can all communicate directly through speech, song, dance and ceremony. A hunter may address a herd of deer and ask that one of them sacri ce itself.

If the hunt succeeds, the hunter may ask the dead animal to forgive him. When someone falls sick, a shaman can contact the spirit that caused the sickness and try to pacify it or scare it away. If need be, the shaman may ask for help from other spirits.

What characterises all these acts of communication is that the entities being addressed are local beings. They are not universal gods, but rather a particular deer, a particular tree, a particular stream, a particular ghost. Just as there is no barrier between humans and other beings, neither is there a strict hierarchy. Non-human entities do not exist merely to provide for the needs of man. Nor are they all-powerful gods who run the world as they wish.

The world does not revolve around humans or around any other particular group of beings. Animism is not a speci c religion. It is a generic name for thousands of very di erent religions, cults and beliefs. Saying that ancient foragers were probably animists is like saying that premodern agriculturists were mostly theists.

Their religious experience may have been turbulent and filled with controversies, reforms and revolutions. But these cautious generalisations are about as far as we can go. Any attempt to describe the specifics of archaic spirituality is highly speculative, as there is next to no evidence to go by and the little evidence we have — a handful of artefacts and cave paintings — can be interpreted in myriad ways. The theories of scholars who claim to know what the foragers felt shed much more light on the prejudices of their authors than on Stone Age religions.

Instead of erecting mountains of theory over a molehill of tomb relics, cave paintings and bone statuettes, it is better to be frank and admit that we have only the haziest notions about the religions of ancient foragers.

The sociopolitical world of the foragers is another area about which we know next to nothing. As explained above, scholars cannot even agree on the basics, such as the existence of private property, nuclear families and monogamous relationships.

Some may have been as hierarchical, tense and violent as the nastiest chimpanzee group, while others were as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a bunch of bonobos.

A painting from Lascaux Cave, c. Some argue that we see a man with the head of a bird and an erect penis, being killed by a bison. Beneath the man is another bird which might symbolise the soul, released from the body at the moment of death. If so, the picture depicts not a prosaic hunting accident, but rather the passage from this world to the next. But we have no way of knowing whether any of these speculations are true.

In Sungir, Russia, archaeologists discovered in a 30,year-old burial site belonging to a mammoth-hunting culture. In one grave they found the skeleton of a fty-year-old man, covered with strings of mammoth ivory beads, containing about 3, beads in total.

Other graves from the same site contained far fewer goods. Scholars deduced that the Sungir mammoth-hunters lived in a hierarchical society, and that the dead man was perhaps the leader of a band or of an entire tribe comprising several bands. It is unlikely that a few dozen members of a single band could have produced so many grave goods by themselves. It looks as if these long-dead hands are reaching towards us from within the rock.

This is one of the most moving relics of the ancient forager world — but nobody knows what it means. Archaeologists then discovered an even more interesting tomb. It contained two skeletons, buried head to head. One belonged to a boy aged about twelve or thirteen, and the other to a girl of about nine or ten. The boy was covered with 5, ivory beads. He wore a fox-tooth hat and a belt with fox teeth at least sixty foxes had to have their teeth pulled to get that many.

The girl was adorned with 5, ivory beads. Both children were surrounded by statuettes and various ivory objects. A skilled craftsman or craftswoman probably needed about forty- ve minutes to prepare a single ivory bead. In other words, fashioning the 10, ivory beads that covered the two children, not to mention the other objects, required some 7, hours of delicate work, well over three years of labour by an experienced artisan!

It is highly unlikely that at such a young age the Sungir children had proved themselves as leaders or mammoth-hunters. Only cultural beliefs can explain why they received such an extravagant burial.

One theory is that they owed their rank to their parents. Perhaps they were the children of the leader, in a culture that believed in either family charisma or strict rules of succession. According to a second theory, the children had been identi ed at birth as the incarnations of some long-dead spirits. They were ritually sacri ced — perhaps as part of the burial rites of the leader — and then entombed with pomp and circumstance. Peace or War? Some scholars imagine ancient hunter-gatherer societies as peaceful paradises, and argue that war and violence began only with the Agricultural Revolution, when people started to accumulate private property.

Other scholars maintain that the world of the ancient foragers was exceptionally cruel and violent. Both schools of thought are castles in the air, connected to the ground by the thin strings of meagre archaeological remains and anthropological observations of present-day foragers.

The anthropological evidence is intriguing but very problematic. Foragers today live mainly in isolated and inhospitable areas such as the Arctic or the Kalahari, where population density is very low and opportunities to ght other people are limited. Moreover, in recent generations, foragers have been increasingly subject to the authority of modern states, which prevent the eruption of large-scale con icts.

European scholars have had only two opportunities to observe large and relatively dense populations of independent foragers: in north-western North America in the nineteenth century, and in northern Australia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Both Amerindian and Aboriginal Australian cultures witnessed frequent armed con icts. The archaeological ndings are both scarce and opaque. What telltale clues might remain of any war that took place tens of thousands of years ago? There were no forti cations and walls back then, no artillery shells or even swords and shields. An ancient spear point might have been used in war, but it could have been used in a hunt as well.

Fossilised human bones are no less hard to interpret. A fracture might indicate a war wound or an accident. Nor is the absence of fractures and cuts on an ancient skeleton conclusive proof that the person to whom the skeleton belonged did not die a violent death. Even more importantly, during pre-industrial warfare more than 90 per cent of war dead were killed by starvation, cold and disease rather than by weapons. Imagine that 30, years ago one tribe defeated its neighbour and expelled it from coveted foraging grounds.

In the decisive battle, ten members of the defeated tribe were killed. In the following year, another hundred members of the losing tribe died from starvation, cold and disease. Archaeologists who come across these no skeletons may too easily conclude that most fell victim to some natural disaster.

How would we be able to tell that they were all victims of a merciless war? Duly warned, we can now turn to the archaeological ndings. In Portugal, a survey was made of skeletons from the period immediately predating the Agricultural Revolution.

Only two skeletons showed clear marks of violence. A similar survey of skeletons from the same period in Israel discovered a single crack in a single skull that could be attributed to human violence. A third survey of skeletons from various pre-agricultural sites in the Danube Valley found evidence of violence on eighteen skeletons. If all eighteen indeed died violently, it means that about 4.

Today, the global average is only 1. During the twentieth century, only 5 per cent of human deaths resulted from human violence — and this in a century that saw the bloodiest wars and most massive genocides in history. If this revelation is typical, the ancient Danube Valley was as violent as the twentieth century.

At Jabl Sahaba in Sudan, a 12, year-old cemetery containing fty-nine skeletons was discovered. Arrowheads and spear points were found embedded in or lying near the bones of twenty-four skeletons, 40 per cent of the nd.

The skeleton of one woman revealed twelve injuries. In Ofnet Cave in Bavaria, archaeologists discovered the remains of thirty- eight foragers, mainly women and children, who had been thrown into two burial pits. Half the skeletons, including those of children and babies, bore clear signs of damage by human weapons such as clubs and knives. The few skeletons belonging to mature males bore the worst marks of violence.

In all probability, an entire forager band was massacred at Ofnet. Which better represents the world of the ancient foragers: the peaceful skeletons from Israel and Portugal, or the abattoirs of Jabl Sahaba and Ofnet? The answer is neither. Just as foragers exhibited a wide array of religions and social structures, so, too, did they probably demonstrate a variety of violence rates. While some areas and some periods of time may have enjoyed peace and tranquillity, others were riven by ferocious conflicts.

When a Sapiens band rst entered a valley inhabited by Neanderthals, the following years might have witnessed a breathtaking historical drama. Unfortunately, nothing would have survived from such an encounter except, at best, a few fossilised bones and a handful of stone tools that remain mute under the most intense scholarly inquisitions.

We may extract from them information about human anatomy, human technology, human diet, and perhaps even human social structure. But they reveal nothing about the political alliance forged between neighbouring Sapiens bands, about the spirits of the dead that blessed this alliance, or about the ivory beads secretly given to the local witch doctor in order to secure the blessing of the spirits.

This curtain of silence shrouds tens of thousands of years of history. These long millennia may well have witnessed wars and revolutions, ecstatic religious movements, profound philosophical theories, incomparable artistic masterpieces. The foragers may have had their all-conquering Napoleons, who ruled empires half the size of Luxembourg; gifted Beethovens who lacked symphony orchestras but brought people to tears with the sound of their bamboo utes; and charismatic prophets who revealed the words of a local oak tree rather than those of a universal creator god.

But these are all mere guesses. The curtain of silence is so thick that we cannot even be sure such things occurred — let alone describe them in detail. Scholars tend to ask only those questions that they can reasonably expect to answer.

Without the discovery of as yet unavailable research tools, we will probably never know what the ancient foragers believed or what political dramas they experienced. The truth is that they did a lot of important things. In particular, they shaped the world around us to a much larger degree than most people realise.

Trekkers visiting the Siberian tundra, the deserts of central Australia and the Amazonian rainforest believe that they have entered pristine landscapes, virtually untouched by human hands. The foragers were there before us and they brought about dramatic changes even in the densest jungles and the most desolate wildernesses. The next chapter explains how the foragers completely reshaped the ecology of our planet long before the rst agricultural village was built.

The wandering bands of storytelling Sapiens were the most important and most destructive force the animal kingdom had ever produced. Each society and each individual usually explore only a tiny fraction of their horizon of possibilities. Some were only injured.

However, this is probably counterbalanced by deaths from trauma to soft tissues and from the invisible deprivations that accompany war. True, they had settled a few islands by swimming short stretches of water or crossing them on improvised rafts.

Flores, for example, was colonised as far back as , years ago. Yet they were unable to venture into the open sea, and none reached America, Australia, or remote islands such as Madagascar, New Zealand and Hawaii. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Terms and Conditions. Press ESC to close. Table of Contents. PDF eBooks.

Addeddate Foldoutcount 0 Identifier epdf. You no longer need to engage in a futile search for 21 lessons for the 21st century pdf free download books in PDF format as this PDF book site brings you the answers to all your questions. I would advise you save time and effort by visiting this site as soon as possible for the PDF Ravinder Singh books. Sapiens showed us where we came from. Homo Deus looked to the future.