50 Fun Facts About Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind

Which crop does Sapiens say domesticated humans, not the reverse, turning foragers into dawn-to-dusk field hands?

Wheat was a wild grass confined to the Middle East 10,000 years ago, and the book argues it spread by putting people to work clearing, weeding and watering its fields.

Sapiens suggests the first name in recorded history belongs not to a king or poet but to someone in which job?

An accountant, it seems: a 5,000-year-old Mesopotamian clay tablet tallying 37 months of grain deliveries is signed Kushim, a name or possibly a job title.

Which French carmaker with a lion badge does Sapiens use to show that a company is a legal fiction?

Peugeot would survive, the book argues, even if every car, factory and worker vanished, because the company exists only in law and shared belief, as it has since Armand Peugeot incorporated it in 1896.

Sapiens presents a theory, built on Robin Dunbar's work, that human language evolved mainly as a way of doing what?

Gossiping let early humans keep track of who in the band could be trusted, the theory goes, so groups could grow well beyond the size of a chimpanzee troop.

Which creed, built on faith in endless economic growth, does Sapiens call the most successful religion ever invented?

Capitalism counts as a religion in the book because it runs on trust in the future: lending only makes sense if people believe tomorrow's pie will be bigger than today's.

Which chapter title in Sapiens sums up its claim that the Agricultural Revolution left most people worse off?

History's Biggest Fraud is the book's verdict on farming: more food fed more mouths, but the average farmer worked harder than a forager and ate a poorer diet.

Sapiens retells how Napoleon III gave his most honored guests cutlery of which metal, leaving gold for the rest?

Aluminum was a costly novelty in the 1850s, priced like a precious metal; the Hall-Héroult process of 1886 later made it cheap enough for drinks cans and kitchen foil.

Which animal does Sapiens name as the first that humans domesticated, well before the Agricultural Revolution began?

The dog was living alongside hunter-gatherers more than 14,000 years ago, long before any farm animal was tamed.

Sapiens names the scientific quest to defeat death after which hero of an ancient Mesopotamian epic?

Gilgamesh sets out to find the secret of eternal life after his closest friend dies, and returns without it; the book suggests modern science has taken up his quest.

Sapiens sets the Declaration of Independence beside which ancient body of law that ranks people in three classes?

The Code of Hammurabi, which the book dates to about 1776 BC, sorts people into superiors, commoners and slaves, while the Declaration of AD 1776 calls all men equal; the book treats both as imagined orders.

Sapiens was first published in 2011 in which language, three years before its English edition appeared?

Hebrew was the language of the 2011 original; its author then put the book into English himself, with help from John Purcell and Haim Watzman.

Which follow-up to Sapiens, subtitled A Brief History of Tomorrow, asks where humankind may be heading next?

Homo Deus joins the Latin for human to the Latin for god, and argues that people will next chase immortality, lasting happiness and godlike powers.

Which author of Guns, Germs, and Steel is named by the writer of Sapiens as one of the book's greatest inspirations?

Jared Diamond's book was an epiphany, the author has said, proof that a historian could write on that scale; Diamond later praised Sapiens in a cover blurb.

Which tech founder picked Sapiens in 2015 for A Year of Books, the online book club he ran for his followers?

Mark Zuckerberg set out to read a book every two weeks through 2015 and announced each pick on Facebook; Sapiens was his choice that June.

Before it was a book, Sapiens took shape as which kind of material, twenty installments in all?

Lectures for an undergraduate world history course came first: twenty of them, matching the twenty chapters of the finished book.

Which practice does Sapiens credit with shortening the human gut and freeing energy for a bigger brain?

Cooking let human ancestors spend far less time chewing and digesting, and a smaller digestive tract left more energy to run a large brain.

Sapiens ranks the first human sea crossing to which continent, about 45,000 years ago, alongside Columbus's voyage?

Australia had never held a human before, and the book blames the newcomers for the swift loss of most of the continent's giant animals.

Sapiens quips that the Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes belongs to the makers of which weapon?

The atomic bomb, built under Robert Oppenheimer, turned war between great powers into collective suicide, which is why the book credits it with the long peace since 1945.

Sapiens retells how which philosopher, offered any favor by Alexander the Great, asked only for his sunlight back?

Diogenes the Cynic wanted nothing a conqueror could give, and the book uses him to argue that an imagined order survives only while most people, unlike him, believe in it.

Sapiens mentions Incitatus, a favorite horse that which Roman emperor allegedly planned to appoint as consul?

Caligula's pampered horse is the book's example of a domesticated animal with a comfortable life, a rare exception to the hard lot of most farm animals.

The title of Sapiens is a Latin word that Carl Linnaeus attached to our species; what does it mean?

Wise is how Linnaeus labeled our species, though the book stresses that for most of its existence Homo sapiens was an animal of no special significance.

Sapiens notes that a finger bone dug from a Siberian cave revealed which previously unknown group of ancient humans?

Denisovans were identified in 2010 from DNA in that single bone, and traces of their genes survive today in the people of Melanesia.

Sapiens describes a dwarf human species, nicknamed the hobbit, that lived on which Indonesian island?

Flores Man stood barely a meter tall, a textbook case of island dwarfism, and survived until roughly the time modern humans reached the region.

The Stadel Cave lion-man, an ivory figurine Sapiens treats as early proof of imagination, was found in which country?

Germany's Swabian Jura yielded the figure, a human body with a lion's head carved from mammoth ivory, which no one could have copied from life.

Which monumental site in Turkey, built about 9500 BC, does Sapiens cite as the work of hunter-gatherers, not farmers?

Göbekli Tepe's massive carved pillars were raised by foragers, and the book suggests the temple may have come first, with farming growing up nearby to feed its builders.

Sapiens describes quipus, the records that let the Incas run a vast state without writing, as being made of what?

Knotted cords of cotton or wool stored numbers in the color and position of their knots, and Spanish officials at first kept using them to run the conquered lands.

Sapiens credits which people of southern Mesopotamia with inventing writing, at first only to record debts and taxes?

The Sumerians pressed signs into wet clay, and for generations their script recorded only quantities and ownership, never a poem or a story.

Sapiens identifies which grain, measured out in one-liter bowls, as the first known currency in Mesopotamia?

Barley came in a standard measure called the sila, about a liter, and wages were set in it: a male laborer earned 60 silas a month, the book notes.

Which human invention does Sapiens call the most universal system of mutual trust ever devised?

Money, the book argues, is the one thing strangers of rival faiths and kingdoms will all accept, which makes it more open-minded than any law or creed.

Sapiens argues that which form of rule, now widely condemned, is the most successful political system ever invented?

Empire, the book says, has been the world's most common form of government for the last 2,500 years, and today's hostility to it may prove a brief exception.

Which religion does Sapiens single out for teaching that suffering arises from craving, a law no god can change?

Buddhism, the book notes, does not deny that gods exist; it simply holds that they have no power over the law Gautama discovered, known as dharma.

Sapiens traces the first known monotheist religion to which pharaoh, who declared one minor sun god supreme?

Akhenaten's revolution did not outlast him: after his death later pharaohs toppled the new cult and restored Egypt's traditional pantheon.

Sapiens tells how which naval captain, sailing to Tahiti in 1768, fed his crew sauerkraut and lost no one to scurvy?

James Cook's expedition, sent to watch Venus cross the Sun, serves in the book as the model of science and conquest sailing together: it also claimed new lands for Britain.

Sapiens contrasts Columbus's three small ships with the vast Ming fleets led by which admiral in the early 1400s?

Zheng He commanded seven voyages between 1405 and 1433, and the book stresses that his fleets explored and traded but never tried to conquer or colonize the lands they visited.

Which 1776 book does Sapiens call probably the most important economics manifesto of all time?

The Wealth of Nations argued that an employer who reinvests his profits to hire more hands enriches everyone, which the book sums up as the claim that greed is good.

Sapiens recounts how which chemist learned to make ammonia from air, feeding billions and arming a blockaded country?

Fritz Haber's ammonia kept wartime explosives factories running without imported nitrates and won him the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; the same process now feeds about half of humanity.

Harry Harlow's infant monkeys, cited in Sapiens, clung to a dummy mother made of what, not the wire one with milk?

Cloth won easily: the infants wanted comfort more than food, and the book uses the result to argue that farm animals raised without their mothers suffer even when well fed.

Sapiens notes that in 1880 British law tied every timetable in the country to the clock of which observatory?

Greenwich time first spread through the railways, whose companies agreed in 1847 to run every train by it instead of by each town's local clock.

Sapiens blames British East India Company rule for a 1770 famine that killed about a third of which province's people?

Bengal's tax revenues had passed to the company only five years earlier, and the book cites the famine as what follows when a trading firm governs a country for profit.

Sapiens quotes the Caledonian chief Calgacus damning Rome as a robber of the world; which historian recorded the speech?

Tacitus put the speech in his Agricola, a life of his own father-in-law, the general who beat Calgacus; some scholars think he invented the chieftain to voice his own doubts.

Which 1818 story does Sapiens invoke as a warning about engineering life?

Frankenstein, the book suggests, comforts readers by implying that tampering with life gets punished, when the real prospect is that engineered beings will simply replace their makers.

Sapiens calls which human species, which lasted close to two million years, the most durable there has ever been?

Homo erectus spread across Asia and learned to control fire, and the book doubts that our own species will come anywhere near its record.

Sapiens notes that the last woolly mammoths held out until about 4,000 years ago in which remote corner of the Arctic?

Wrangel Island was cut off from Siberia by rising seas, and the book ties the sudden end of its mammoths to the arrival of the first humans on the island.

From 2020, Sapiens was retold with David Vandermeulen and Daniel Casanave in which new format?

A graphic novel version began with The Birth of Humankind, which hands the argument to a cast of invented characters such as Detective Lopez.

Which children's retelling of Sapiens, planned as four volumes, promises to explain how humans took over the world?

Unstoppable Us began in 2022 with a volume illustrated by Ricard Zaplana Ruiz, covering the same ground as the adult book in under 200 pages.

Sapiens cites which crusader king, killed by gangrene from a shoulder wound in 1199, to show medicine's progress?

Richard the Lionheart's wound would count as minor today, the book observes; without antibiotics it turned gangrenous and killed him within two weeks.

Slughorn and Sprout, two imaginary professors vying for a grant in Sapiens, share names with teachers in which series?

Harry Potter readers know them as Hogwarts teachers; in the book one wants to study a cow disease that cuts milk yields, the other whether cows suffer when parted from their calves.

Sapiens calls which queen, the mother of Alexander the Great, one of the most forceful women of the ancient world?

Olympias was suspected in antiquity of approving the murder of her husband, Philip II of Macedon, and later fought his successors for control of the kingdom.

Sapiens cites the Chinese myth of which goddess, who molded nobles from yellow soil and commoners from brown mud?

Nüwa's two grades of clay are one of the book's examples of how societies have explained their hierarchies as natural or divinely made.

Sapiens names which West Bank town, then just a village, among the world's largest settlements of about 8500 BC?

Jericho's few hundred villagers are the book's starting point for a growth spurt: within a few thousand years cities held tens of thousands and kingdoms ruled a million subjects.