Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Refutes most of the claims made by Harari in Sapiens Can You elaborate on this? - I quite liked Harraris book, especially his ideas about stories driving human cooperation and expansion. Does this false claims invalidates the main message of Sapiens?
"Most" is an exaggeration; "many" would have been fine; it's been a while since I read Sapiens, sorry about that. I was mainly referring to how he talks about the invention of agriculture. There has never been an agricultural "revolution". Cultivation was practiced for at least 3,000 years (probably much longer) before some human groups decided to make it their main mode of subsistence, while many others, already fam…
In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometers of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?
Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants. It wasn’t easy.*