Sapiens
A Brief History of Humankind
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Narrated by:
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Derek Perkins
About this listen
From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity's creation and evolution - a number one international best seller - that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be "human".
One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one - Homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?
Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago, with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.
Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because, over the last few decades, humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?
This provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.
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From the earliest civilizations to the 21st century: a global journey through human history, published alongside a landmark BBC One television series. Our understanding of world history is changing, as new discoveries are made on all the continents and old prejudices are being challenged. In this truly global journey, Andrew Marr revisits some of the traditional epic stories, from classical Greece and Rome to the rise of Napoleon, but surrounds them with less familiar material, from Peru to the Ukraine, China to the Caribbean.
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25 hours of enjoyment
- By Mark on 04-26-13
By: Andrew Marr
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The World Until Yesterday
- What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
- By: Jared Diamond
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 18 hrs and 31 mins
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Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence.
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A visit with our ancient ancestors
- By BRB on 01-30-13
By: Jared Diamond
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A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
- A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
- By: Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore
- Narrated by: Simon Mattacks
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism.
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A remarkable exposé & synthesis of the Ponzi scheme that capitalism is and always has been.
- By Scott on 02-10-18
By: Raj Patel, and others
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A Troublesome Inheritance
- Genes, Race, and Human History
- By: Nicholas Wade
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
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Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years - to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes.
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This is NOT Racism!...
- By Douglas on 06-01-14
By: Nicholas Wade
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Pandora's Seed
- The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization
- By: Spencer Wells
- Narrated by: Spencer Wells
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
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This new book by Spencer Wells, the internationally known geneticist, anthropologist, author, and director of the Genographic Project, focuses on the seminal event in human history: mankind's decision to become farmers rather than hunter-gatherers.
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Short and unfocused, but often quite interesting.
- By Alan on 06-23-10
By: Spencer Wells
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Civilization
- The West and the Rest
- By: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Niall Ferguson
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
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The rise to global predominance of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five hundred years. All over the world, an astonishing proportion of people now work for Western-style companies, study at Western-style universities, vote for Western-style governments, take Western medicines, wear Western clothes, and even work Western hours. Yet six hundred years ago the petty kingdoms of Western Europe seemed unlikely to achieve much more than perpetual internecine warfare. It was Ming China or Ottoman Turkey that had the look of world civilizations.
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Thoughtful analysis of the ascendancy of the West.
- By Patrick on 05-25-13
By: Niall Ferguson
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Age of Discovery
- Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
- By: Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
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Age of Discovery explores a world on the brink of a new Renaissance and asks: how do we share more widely the benefits of unprecedented progress? How do we endure the inevitable tumult generated by accelerating change? How do we each thrive through this tangled, uncertain time? From gains in health, education, wealth and technology to crises of conflict, disease and mass migration, the similarities between today's world and that of the 15th century are both striking and prophetic: we have been here before.
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A monotonous text disguised as casual reading.
- By Rob on 07-29-16
By: Ian Goldin, and others
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What Is America
- A Short History of the New World Order
- By: Ronald Wright
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
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Ranging with dazzling expertise through anthropology, history, and literature, Wright reconfigures our self-perception, arguing that the "essence" of America can be traced to the foundations of our history--literally to the collision of worlds that began in 1492, as one civilization subsumed another--and exploring how these currents continue to shape our world.
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insightful overview
- By rm3154 on 04-19-12
By: Ronald Wright
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Debt - Updated and Expanded
- The First 5,000 Years
- By: David Graeber
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 17 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods - that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.
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Transformative to the point of being revolutionary
- By James C. Samans on 08-14-16
By: David Graeber
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Before the Dawn
- Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors
- By: Nicholas Wade
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
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Just in the last three years a flood of new scientific findings, driven by revelations discovered in the human genome, has provided compelling new answers to many long-standing mysteries about our most ancient ancestors, the people who first evolved in Africa and then went on to colonize the whole world. Nicholas Wade weaves this host of news-making findings together for the first time into an intriguing new history of the human story before the dawn of civilization.
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Amazing information
- By Albert on 06-15-07
By: Nicholas Wade
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The Invention of Yesterday
- A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection
- By: Tamim Ansary
- Narrated by: Tamim Ansary
- Length: 17 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative. Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories - to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable.
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Relaxed but packed with insight
- By Tad Davis on 02-14-20
By: Tamim Ansary
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What listeners say about Sapiens
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anthony James Pologruto, Jr
- 09-29-17
Information about our species like never before
The book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is brimming with information regarding our storied pre-history. Although at some points, it feels as though the author is loosely basing the assumptions made in reality, the overall story is brimming with more information than any other source that I've read. Prepare to view your species differently.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 11-07-18
A very interesting perspective of history.
I read many reviews about the second part of the book criticizing the second half of it. Nonetheless the book provides an objective perspective of our economical, social and political evolution throughout history. Evidently there are plenty controversial things in our history we may not want to talk about. We as humans are full of contradictions; as our history has shown. Hope you enjoy it too!
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4 people found this helpful
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- Robert A. Marselle
- 05-23-19
How is it possible to politicize evolution?
Such an eloquent voice, but too much emphasis by intonations that some how human beings are responsible for the world being harsh. As if it was all mindful and self will. My perspective just might be, all wet. Likely being hypervigilant to how facts can be skillfully manipulated in the Group Think attitudes of judgement and opinion seen in modern press. I couldn't finish it. So disappointingly sad.
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4 people found this helpful
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- The Alchemist
- 12-23-18
Superb Breadth
Wow!!!! Imagine if we took the natural curiosity creativity and abstract ness of a child’s mind and nurtured and fed them with same rather than destroyed those things in most of them? Our salvation lies in the diversity of our minds not the zip code and access barriers that bred monogamy of thought....
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- Glenn
- 11-29-18
The most important book you will ever read
An astonishing work of history, science, literature, and critical thought. Should be the manual every attempt at education builds toward, and from. It’s that good.
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- Shertex
- 05-02-19
Excellent Beginning, Good Middle, Boring End
Overall a good book about the history of mankind told from a very different perspective. The first portion covers prehistoric times and this portion was the most captivating. The next sections covered recorded history which were laid out in broad themes and very different than more traditional looks at history. For example the agriculture revolution is viewed as an evolutionary victory for wheat as it enslaved humans to its cultivation. Some of these sections were quite thought provoking, while others became a bit long. The final quarter of the book covers more modern times with a glimpse of the future. At this point the book was a bit tedious and found myself skipping and skimming the final chapters as there are better texts on the subject matter. Narration is excellent and easy to listen and understand.
Would recommend it for someone looking for an unusual take on human history. While many of the views and interpretations are subjective, overly general, and could be controversial in the views of more purist historians, nonetheless the book does help challenge our traditional rationalizations when it comes to the past and therefore is a worthwhile read.
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- GGReader
- 09-04-18
Fascinating stroll through history
It's not brief, but it does give the reader a walk through history and a peek at a possible future. Obviously the author does not like many of the things Sapiens have done to the planet or each other! I love the idea that war, on a grand scale, should be a thing of the past. What is there to steal when this is the age of intelligence as a resource?
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- alejandro Ferrer
- 11-21-18
Wowwww
This book its amazing.. Totally recommend, I can say that change my way of thinking
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Overall
- Roshan Lal
- 11-14-18
One of the best book I read/listened to!
Great subject matter and superb style. Thoroughly enjoyed and learned a lot from this book.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Wagh
- 11-05-21
Best book I ever Audibled! Kicked my a**, loved it.
Great book that informs you and makes you rethink all your notions.
What do we want ourselves to want for ourselves in the future? Oooh!
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