Yuval Noah Harari explains the evolution of humankind through three major revolutions in his book Sapiens. Harari takes a long view of humanity, trying to understand our very origins as a species and how we became who we are today. The three revolutions he identifies changed the course and direction of the evolution of humankind, and might lead to us becoming something unrecognizable in the future.
Harari writes, “the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different.”
This quick quote shows that the development of humans has been long and slow, but that recent changes have been dramatically quick in comparison. Human brains began to change dramatically during the Cognitive Revolution, but those changes did not spark instant societies and further tool use or manipulation of nature. 50,000 years of evolution took place before an Agricultural Revolution, which marked another change in human behavior, thinking, social structures, and life. What it meant to be human and the experience of living humans changed little in the 50,000 years between the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions, even though our minds were evolving dramatically.
But in the last 500 years, with the Scientific Revolution, the human experience has changed dramatically. It is possible that these dramatic changes and advances will continue, to the point where humans will no longer be recognizable as human when compared to the species that kicked off the Cognitive Revolution or the Agricultural Revolution. The Scientific Revolution put us on a new path that may end up with humans fusing with computers and machines to be human in a way, but not in a way that a human from 12,000 years would recognize.
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