Some of the liveliest debates that we had were exactly about such issues.” Even if you don’t have all the facts, you need to make a call. And of course, it brings up a lot of issues, ideological and political, about race and gender. “So, for example, if you discuss sexual relations between Sapiens and Neanderthals, in a text you can avoid the question of, was it a Sapiens man with a Neanderthal woman or the other way around? What did they look like? It forces you to go back to the scientific research. “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 behavior, 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,” Harari says.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,” Harari says. His co-authors on the new book, the French illustrator Daniel Casanave and Belgian scriptwriter David Vandermeulen, insisted Harari step into the frame. 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.
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