“Texts can be very abstract, but when you draw, you have to be concrete,” he says. It also challenged Harari to flesh out some of his original observations. “The core ideas have remained the same” with each new adaptation, says Harari, though the illustrated version did give him “the opportunity to rethink some of the details – science has discovered a lot of new things over the past decade and a half”. Sapiens grew out of an undergraduate lecture series on world history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where Harari still teaches, before becoming a bestseller in Israel in 2011. Among the cast are a masked superhero, Doctor Fiction, who personifies “the human superpower to create and believe in fictional stories”, and a hard-boiled New York detective “investigating who killed most of the big animals of the planet more than 10,000 years ago”.
Some, such as the Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar, a specialist in primate behaviour, are real figures who have shaped Harari’s thinking but most are fictional. “They convinced me it’s a very efficient storytelling technique, and that it would make it easier to convey at least some of the messages if you have this guide who accompanies the reader.”Īs a compromise, they agreed to include a cast of scientists “who could explain different disciplines and present different theories – it’s important to show science as a collaborative effort and not as an individual enterprise,” says Harari. His co-authors on the new book, the French illustrator Daniel Casanave and Belgian scriptwriter David Vandermeulen, insisted Harari step into the frame. Scientists often speak in jargon, statistics, graphs, which most people find difficult – people usually think in stories On the opening page he greets us from an armchair, book open on his lap, ready for story-time later he leads a fictional niece through the complexities of evolution and his theories on how an obscure savannah-dwelling ape rose to world domination.
So it’s curious to see the 44-year-old appearing in Sapiens: A Graphic History, serving as an avuncular cartoon tour guide through the early days of humanity.
“If Harari weren’t always out in public,” a New Yorker profile noted earlier this year, “one might mistake him for a recluse.” Slim, bespectacled and shaven-headed, he speaks softly but insistently not just about our distant past but also of the near future of humanity and the various existential threats looming.
But for all his ambition and influence, Harari cuts a rather sober figure.
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