Some noteable quotes: > Agriculture transformed humanity’s relationship to nature, giving us dominion. Thanks to agriculture, ecologists say, we now suck up ha

Some noteable quotes: > Agriculture transformed humanity’s relationship to nature, giving us dominion. Thanks to agriculture, ecologists say, we now suck up half or more of the primary productivity of the planet. Bad idea, Mr. Harari says. Agriculture increased the amount of available food, yet the result of prosperity was not happiness but “population explosions and pampered elites.” Farmers worked harder than foragers and had a worse diet and poorer health. The surplus went to the privileged few, who used it to oppress. “The Agricultural Revolution,” Mr. Harari says, “was history’s biggest fraud.” Really? Always and everywhere? Were the Iroquois, who farmed, so much worse off than the foraging Abitibis and Témiscamingues to their north? Discussing the long dispute among anthropologists about whether the earliest hunter-gatherers lived in “peaceful paradises” or were “exceptionally cruel and violent,” Mr. Harari maintains that the question can’t be answered, because the meager data from archaeology and anthropology aren’t enough to pierce “the curtain of silence” that enshrouds our remotest ancestors. Surely the same logic applies to comparing their well-being to that of the earliest farmers. > “The Romans, Mongols, and Aztecs voraciously conquered new lands in search of power and wealth—not of knowledge. In contrast, European imperialists set out to distant shores in the hope of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories.” > “Unfortunately,” he says, “the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of.”