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095 - A Brief History of Humankind

Hello there, Kevin here with another episode of the Feel Good English podcast; the only podcast that is helping you become more fluent in English and more fluent in life, at the same time.

Today we’re going to talk about history, something I don’t do very often here on the Feel Good English podcast, but this book that I’ve recently read is very interesting and I wanted to share something different with you, very interesting ideas on the history of humans, going all the way back three hundred thousand years, three hundred thousand years.

I’m going to talk about five main changes, transitions that happened during our evolution that has led us to common times.

If this is interesting to you I would highly recommend searching out the book we’re going to talk about today which is called “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.” The author of this book is Yuval Noah Harari.

I’m going to talk about some of the key concepts from the book to give you an idea of what it’s about and also, of course, to help you build your English knowledge, teaching you some new vocabulary, phrasal verbs, expressions and whatever may come about. Hope you enjoy this episode. Now let’s get into the lesson on “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”

So the first humans, the first species of humans appeared around two point five million years ago in East Africa. Two point five million years, two and a half million years ago.

Now I don’t want to be controversial here if you have different religious Full Transcript

views that’s totally okay, I’m talking about the book here, so hopefully, you’re open to the ideas here.

Anyways, so it wasn’t until three hundred thousand years ago that the modern humans, homo sapiens first appeared. This is when humans had bigger brains, they could walk upright as opposed to hunched over; they used tools and they were more social, so the things that separate us from apes.

The first big transition that happened is what he calls in the book a Cognitive Revolution. This is when the brain capabilities of humans, homo sapiens, expanded quite a bit, they got a lot larger and humans were able to outperform the rest of the other species.

They’d started developing communities, better tools, and techniques, and this allowed them to find resources, food, shelter, things like this in harsh environments and where other less evolved, less cognitively evolved species would die out because they couldn’t find the resources, they weren’t smart enough to continue to survive.

This also allowed humans to start venturing out into other parts of the land, to search out more pleasant places to live. They went from Africa and they went into Europe, Asia, America, even all the way down into Australia.

During this cognitive revolution they developed language; language was vital. If you found somewhere that was full of food, you needed to go back and be able to tell your friends and family where that food was so they could go find it themselves. Or you could just tell your best friends, your favorite people so they secretly could go find that food and not share it with the others. So language helped you be able to communicate about things that helped you survive. If there was a big dinosaur coming to attack, you could tell your friends about it; that’s not correct, dinosaurs were long gone at this point, but you get the idea.

Another big thing language did is it allowed humans to talk about abstract ideas and to connect over ideas. In the book, they call these “Common myths”. Common myths are things like gods, history, stories and religion. So by sharing their ideas about religion, communities were formed, they were formed over common beliefs.

The next big revolution, big transition is called the Agricultural Revolution; agricultural, dealing with plants and growing things in farming basically.

Before this revolution, humans lived a nomadic lifestyle; they would hunt and gather, hunt and gather. They would go hunt for food and gather plants and fruits and things to eat, so they were constantly moving because the animals would move and they would eat all the vegetation in a specific area.

But about twelve thousand years ago, only twelve thousand years ago, that’s not too long ago, there was the Agricultural Revolution where homo sapiens stopped relying on hunting and gathering and began to cultivate crops and domesticate animals. And only ten thousand years ago basically all humankind had settled into this agricultural lifestyle.

Something interesting he talks about in the book is this was the creation of work, and deciding to become farmers and to create all of our food forced us to work all day, from dawn till dusk, as opposed to just a few hours of hunting.

Imagine the days when you’d wake up in the morning, or you’d wake up whenever you want or I guess when people were being loud or there were scary animals around you; but you’d wake up, you would go find food you’d go hunt for food if you didn’t have any and then your day would be done, that’s it.

You’d eat your food, that’s all you had to really do, versus, nowadays you wake up in the morning, you work all day and it’s a never-ending cycle.

This started way back in this agricultural revolution when humans thought it would be smart to create their own food as opposed to going out and hunting it which created long workdays. Dammit, why did they have to do that do that?

So, what happened from this? Well because humans, homo sapiens were able to create more food than they needed and to sustain their population from a constant food supply, the population exploded. And how did societies cope with such a population boom?

Well, one of the ways is they invented money. Before the agricultural revolution, life was pretty simple; if you didn’t have meat, you’d ask somebody for their meat or you’d fight for their meat and you’d eat and vice versa; they’d come ask for you for meat, or they’d fight you for your meat. So pretty straight forward. With the development of agriculture, you could trade and they started something called the barter system. BA-R-T-E-R, to barter is to trade, I give you this, you give me that. I give you some meat, you give me some clothes. Alright, so that’s what’s that’s what bartering is.

But this could only go so far because at some point you wouldn’t have anything to trade for something else. If you had meat and somebody else had clothes, but you had enough clothes and that’s all they could give you, well why would you want more clothes? So they wouldn’t get your meat; so what did humans come up with? They came up with money.

Not going to go into the details of how money started but as you can see, there came a point where there needed to be something to trade that was always valuable. So if you wanted to give somebody a piece of meat they could give you something back that you could use in a larger variety of ways.

At this point, you can see why there was a need for laws; laws needed to be created so people could behave in appropriate ways. You also needed authority so somebody could enforce these laws, enforce a law, E-N-F-O-R-C-E. To enforce a law is to make somebody obey that law.

So this is where hierarchal societies were born, hierarchal with a king, queen, these types of things. There needed to be people to enforce laws.

Taxes, things like this were created as well and very interesting here, how did these kings and queens and these emperors get people to obey their laws. Maybe people didn’t care; they were punished in a certain way, maybe they didn’t matter that much because they were going to die anyway.

This is where religion became very important. If people accepted the ruler as also connected with God, and God had the same will as the ruler had, well they would probably accept these laws and rules more easily.

So as the empires spread their religions, theses specific religions to these empires spread as well.

This is why obviously religion is regional. Where culture started, where empires started is where specific religions started and now they have spread out around the world, quite interesting. But religion is pretty much based on where you’re born, right? You’re born into a specific religion, even these days; if your family is that religion that’s what you are.

Next big revolution here, the scientific revolution. So up until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sixteenth and seventeenth-century history, interesting point here; the sixteenth century would be the years 1500 until 1599; so the year 1554 is in the sixteenth century, the year 1694 is in the seventeenth century. Got it?

Up until this point, people pretty much thought gods chose their fate, gods and the empires that were connected with these gods basically controlled your fate, your destiny, what was going to happen with you, so people were quite pessimistic because they didn’t feel they had much control over their future.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth century attitudes began to change and the scientific revolution swept through Europe. People started to think how they could actually improve society through science; experimenting, observation, looking at the sky, developing medicine, physics, how to make things work better, started changing things.

And the benefits of science became very attractive, so European governments started to finance and invest in scientists and explorers to go around the world looking for new materials, resources to make them more powerful.

During this time European economies grew a lot as a result of the exploration and scientific innovation. This is when a lot of the Europeans colonized the rest of the world. Maybe you’re from one of those European-colonized countries.

And those are the major revolutions you could say that have developed our society. I thought it was very interesting to put it into perspective and into big shifts of how we developed as humans, as homo sapiens.

Looking back at all of this history in the last tens of thousands of years, today we are as comfortable as we have ever been.

But at the end of the book, he starts talking about happiness; we’ve never been more comfortable than we are right now, humans are extremely comfortable relatively to where they used to be. But does that mean we’re happier, or more satisfied? All of this scientific evolution, scientific progress and evolution, has it made us happier as humans? Are we better off?

He also brings up the fact that most of the wealth and money that is in this world belongs to the pockets of a few white men. Not going to go into these topics, these are topics for another day; just something to think about.

Being comfortable having all that we need, does it make us happy?

Action step for the day, just think about how connected we all are; we all came from basically the same place, we’re all here for basically the same reasons, just to get through our life, right? Most of us are trying our best, we’re living each day, we don’t have the answers to everything, nobody has the answers to everything.

Nowadays through social media, we’ve totally changed how we look at each other and I think we are often dissatisfied with the way that we are because we see everybody else’s life all of the time, all over the world, which creates a lot of envy. So at some point today, take a minute to think of how connected we are, we’re animals roaming around this big earth trying to figure out life. And the best you can do, make somebody smile.

I have a creation verse evolution joke for you today, it’s a little longer but here we go.

So a little girl asked her mother, “Mom, how did the human race appear?” And the mother answered, “God made Adam and Eve and they had children and that’s how humans were created.”

Two days later the girl asked her father the same question and her father answered, “Many years ago there were apes from which the human race evolved.”

The confused girl returned to her mother and said, “Mom, how was it possible that you told me the human race was created by God and dad said they developed from apes?” And the mother answered, “Well dear, it’s very simple. I told you about my side of the family and your father told you about his.”

Hope you enjoyed this lesson on history today and I will see you next week.

Bye bye.