A Brief History of Humankind with Yuval Noah Harari

Welcome to history. I'm Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, and I teach history at the Hebrew University in the ancient city of Jerusalem, a place suffering, perhaps, from too much history. Over the last ten years, I've been teaching a course on the history of the world, beginning with the evolution of humankind in the Stone Age and ending with the political and technological revolutions of the 21st century which are likely to lead to the disappearance of humankind. I'm used to teaching a rather mixed crowd of students. Most of my students are Israelis but some are Palestinian and quite a few are foreign exchange students. I would be delighted if you, too, joined this course via the internet and journeyed together with us into our common and traveled past. One hundred thousand years ago, our species, *** Sapiens, was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. Earth was then home to at least five other human species such as the Neanderthals and *** erectus. The most important thing to know about all these ancient human species is none of them was important. There were less than one million humans altogether on planet Earth and their combined impact on the ecology was minimal, less than that of, say, penguins or zebras. Today, in contrast, only one human species has survived, our species, but we control the world. Just look at the numbers. Today there are about 7,000,000,000 humans in the world. If you took all of us together and put us on a very big scale, our total weight would be about 300 million tons. If you now take all the farmyard animals that we have domesticated and enslaved, like cattle and sheep and pigs and horses, and put them on a very large scale and weigh them together, their total weight would be around 700 million tons. That's 300 million tons of humanity and 700 million tons of our domesticated animals. In contrast, if you now take all the wild big animals left on Earth, elephants and lions and crocodiles and whales and penguins and sharks and ostriches and so forth, and put all of them on a big scale and weigh them, their combined weight, nobody really knows exactly how much it is, some say 40 million, 60 million, 80 million, but most all scholars agree that all the wild big animals left on Earth together weigh less than 100 million tons. So less than 10 percent of the large animals today on planet Earth are still wild animals. More than 90 percent are either humans or the domesticated animals that humans enslave and control, and even the survival of the remaining wild animals depends on us. How did we reach this position? What was our secret of success that turned us from an insignificant African ape into the rulers of the world? I hope that by the end of this course you will have a clear answer to this question. I hope that you will also have a general picture of the whole of human history as well as answers to some fundamental historical questions such as what is religion, what is an empire, what is money and what is likely, what is the likely future of humankind.