Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014)
by Yuval Noah Harari
In other words, the average forager had wider, deeper, and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don't need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher, or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life's necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along, people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new niches for imbeciles were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.🏁
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In other words, the average forager had wider, deeper, and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don't need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher, or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life's necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history. There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along, people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new niches for imbeciles were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.🏁