“It’s not fair!” Most of us have thought this, or spoken these words at some time.
This statement can be for something minor such as how many sweets are handed out among siblings, but in Unstoppable Us (2) Why The World Isn’t Fair, this relates to how through the ages, some humans became kings and queens, and some became slaves. This uneven order among us happened about 10,000 years ago. But how and why?
“The answer to that is one of the strangest tales you’ll ever hear.
And it’s a true story.”
In the first book of this series, readers learn how and why humans are the most powerful animals on the planet, even though we’re not the fastest, or strongest and can’t even fly.
In this volume, humankind’s story continues with a timeline that begins 25,000 years ago. The important event at this stage in history was the domestication of wolves into dogs.
What follows is an agricultural revolution, and humankind’s control of even more of the planet, including plants and animals like sheep, pigs, cows and cats. But all of these require communication between humans, and slowly but clearly, the answers to the above questions are revealed.
Stories are the base of these revelations, just as in the first book – all providing ways to convince people through the ages to act a certain way, listen to certain people and help form the first communities of wealth and power vs poverty and slavery. This of course is a slow process over thousands of years, and different in all parts of the world.
Humans might be cleverer than other animals, but even humans don’t see the possible future of their actions. Inequality grows in many different ways, and life becomes much more complicated than how our ancestors, the hunter-gatherers lived.
But now in the 21st Century, many rules are universal wherever you go. We all stop at red lights. We all play football with the same rules.
“How did this happen? How did some stories and rules spread all over the planet?”
Yuval Harari continues his series for children (based on his book Sapiens which has sold multi million copies around the world).
This series takes readers (young and old) through human history in a clear, easy to understand way, unravelling reasons why things happened using proven science and of course, a certain amount of scientific guess work as to how things were thousands of years ago.
The Unstoppable Us series is illustrated throughout, making the fascinating information even easier to access and understand.
I can’t wait for the next volume in this story of human history.
Author – Yuval Noah Harari
Illustrator – Ricard Zaplana Ruiz
Age – 9-99
(2024, Penguin UK, Series, Non-Fiction, Humankind, Human History, Agricultural Revolution, Power, Control, Stories, Religions, Rich & Poor)