Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
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50 free Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind compresses some 70,000 years into four parts and twenty chapters, and it does so by picking fights. Yuval Noah Harari argues that our species took over the planet because it can believe in shared fictions, that the move to farming was a bad bargain for most of the people who made it, and that science, credit and conquest grew up together. This quiz follows the book from start to finish. It covers the other human species that once shared the world with us, the rise of villages, writing and hierarchy, the forces that pulled separate cultures into one global society, and the scientific age with its questions about happiness and the future of our species. Along the way it asks about the examples readers tend to remember, from a French car company to a pampered Roman horse, and about how the book itself came to be written, translated and adapted. It is written for readers and book clubs who have finished Sapiens and want to test what stuck, for students revising its arguments, and for anyone curious whether the big ideas hold up in the details. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which crop does Sapiens say domesticated humans, not the reverse, turning foragers into dawn-to-dusk field hands?
Wheat
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.
Q 02Sapiens suggests the first name in recorded history belongs not to a king or poet but to someone in which job?
An accountant
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.
Q 03Which French carmaker with a lion badge does Sapiens use to show that a company is a legal fiction?
Peugeot
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.
Q 04Sapiens presents a theory, built on Robin Dunbar's work, that human language evolved mainly as a way of doing what?
Gossiping
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.
Q 05Which creed, built on faith in endless economic growth, does Sapiens call the most successful religion ever invented?
Capitalism
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.
Q 06Which chapter title in Sapiens sums up its claim that the Agricultural Revolution left most people worse off?
History's Biggest Fraud
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.
Q 07Sapiens retells how Napoleon III gave his most honored guests cutlery of which metal, leaving gold for the rest?
Aluminum
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.
Q 08Which animal does Sapiens name as the first that humans domesticated, well before the Agricultural Revolution began?
The dog
The dog was living alongside hunter-gatherers more than 14,000 years ago, long before any farm animal was tamed.
Q 09Sapiens names the scientific quest to defeat death after which hero of an ancient Mesopotamian epic?
Gilgamesh
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.
Q 10Sapiens sets the Declaration of Independence beside which ancient body of law that ranks people in three classes?
Code of Hammurabi
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.
Q 11Sapiens was first published in 2011 in which language, three years before its English edition appeared?
Hebrew
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.
Q 12Which follow-up to Sapiens, subtitled A Brief History of Tomorrow, asks where humankind may be heading next?
Homo Deus
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.
Q 13Which author of Guns, Germs, and Steel is named by the writer of Sapiens as one of the book's greatest inspirations?
Jared Diamond
Q 21The title of Sapiens is a Latin word that Carl Linnaeus attached to our species; what does it mean?
Wise
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.
Q 22Sapiens notes that a finger bone dug from a Siberian cave revealed which previously unknown group of ancient humans?
Denisovans
Denisovans were identified in 2010 from DNA in that single bone, and traces of their genes survive today in the people of Melanesia.
Q 23Sapiens describes a dwarf human species, nicknamed the hobbit, that lived on which Indonesian island?
Flores
Flores Man stood barely a meter tall, a textbook case of island dwarfism, and survived until roughly the time modern humans reached the region.
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.
Q 14Which tech founder picked Sapiens in 2015 for A Year of Books, the online book club he ran for his followers?
Mark Zuckerberg
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.
Q 15Before it was a book, Sapiens took shape as which kind of material, twenty installments in all?
Lectures
Lectures for an undergraduate world history course came first: twenty of them, matching the twenty chapters of the finished book.
Q 16Which practice does Sapiens credit with shortening the human gut and freeing energy for a bigger brain?
Cooking
Cooking let human ancestors spend far less time chewing and digesting, and a smaller digestive tract left more energy to run a large brain.
Q 17Sapiens ranks the first human sea crossing to which continent, about 45,000 years ago, alongside Columbus's voyage?
Australia
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.
Q 18Sapiens quips that the Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes belongs to the makers of which weapon?
Atomic bomb
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.
Q 19Sapiens retells how which philosopher, offered any favor by Alexander the Great, asked only for his sunlight back?
Diogenes
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.
Q 20Sapiens mentions Incitatus, a favorite horse that which Roman emperor allegedly planned to appoint as consul?
Caligula
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.
Q 24The Stadel Cave lion-man, an ivory figurine Sapiens treats as early proof of imagination, was found in which country?
Germany
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.
Q 25Which monumental site in Turkey, built about 9500 BC, does Sapiens cite as the work of hunter-gatherers, not farmers?
Göbekli Tepe
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.
Q 26Sapiens describes quipus, the records that let the Incas run a vast state without writing, as being made of what?
Knotted cords
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.
Q 27Sapiens credits which people of southern Mesopotamia with inventing writing, at first only to record debts and taxes?
The Sumerians
The Sumerians pressed signs into wet clay, and for generations their script recorded only quantities and ownership, never a poem or a story.
Q 28Sapiens identifies which grain, measured out in one-liter bowls, as the first known currency in Mesopotamia?
Barley
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.
Q 29Which human invention does Sapiens call the most universal system of mutual trust ever devised?
Money
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.
Q 30Sapiens argues that which form of rule, now widely condemned, is the most successful political system ever invented?
Empire
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.