Written by Yuval Noah Harari
ISBN-10: 0099590085
『If the
larger picture of ancient forager life is hard to reconstruct, particular
events are largely irretrievable.
When a sapiens band first entered 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 fossilized 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 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 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
Beethoven who lacked symphony orchestras but brought people to tears with the
sound of their bamboo flutes; 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.
Yet it is vital to
ask questions for which no answers are available, otherwise we might be tempted
to dismiss 60000 of 70000 years of human history with the excuse that the
people who lived back then did nothing of importance’.
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 realize.
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.
But that’s an illusion.
he foragers were there before us and they brought about dramatic changes even
in the densest jungles and the most desolate wilderness.
The next chapter
explains how the foragers completely reshaped the ecology of our planet long
before the first agricultural village was built. The wandering bands of
storytelling sapiens were the most important and most destructive force the
animal kingdom had ever produced. 』
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