Yuval Noah Harari

No other animal [Homo sapiens] had ever moved into such a huge variety of habitats so quickly.

According to a famous Hindu creation myth, the gods fashioned the world out of the body of a primeval being, the Purusa. The sun was created from Purusa's eyes, the moon from Purusa's brain, the Brahmins (priests) from the mouth, the Kshatriyas (warriors) from its arms, the s (peasants and merchants) from its thighs, and Shudras (servants) from its legs.

The Galápagos Islands... remained uninhabited by humans until the nine-teenth century.., preserving a unique menagerie...

One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally, they reach a point where they can't live without it.

The earliest Sumerian writing was a partial... script. Full script is a system of material signs that can represent spoken language... everything people... say, including poetry. Partial script... can represent only particular... information... [in] a limited field of activity.

Even today, with all our advanced technology, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants... our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC - wheat, rice, maize (called 'corn' in US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant and animal has been domesticated in the last 2000 years.

The Roman Empire... collected taxes from up to 100 million subjects. This... financed... 250,000 - 500,000 soldiers, a road network still in use.., and theatres and amphitheatres that host spectacles to this day.

Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and... enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.

Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe's surface, almost ten times the size of Britain.

In the conventional picture, pioneers first built a village, and when it prospered, they set up a temple... But suggests... the temple may have been built first...

From the dawn of agriculture.., billions... armed with branches, swatters, shoes and poison sprays have waged... wars against diligent ants, furtive roaches, adventurous spiders and misguided beetles that constantly infiltrate the human domicile.

[W]hen... complex societies began to appear.., a... new type of information became vital ― numbers.