About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia, and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the impact of human expansion on large mammals and biodiversity throughout history.
Yuval Noah Harari emphasizes the significant and often devastating consequences of human colonization on the planet's wildlife. As humans migrated and settled in various regions, they inadvertently caused the extinction of a vast number of species, revealing a stark reality about the relationship between human advancement and environmental degradation. This pattern is consistently observed across different continents and time periods, highlighting the urgent need to understand our historical impact on biodiversity.
In practice
In a lecture on environmental history.
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.
I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.
The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.
Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe.
The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, 'What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?'
Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.
One might have thought that 70 years was time enough to work out what really happened in 1939. It isn't the case. Misunderstandings and misinformation abound.
There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.
It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.
Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union.
Why is it that, next to the birthday of the Savior of the world, your most joyous and most venerated festival returns on this day (the 4th of July)? Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birthday of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birthday of the Savior?.
During World War II, law-abiding Japanese-American citizens were herded into remote internment camps, losing their jobs, businesses and social standing, while an all-Japanese-American division fought heroically in Europe.
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