I have read the book The Homo Sapiens. Instead of just introducing the history, I think the writer tries to use the history as his proof to support his thoughts about the human being and the society.
In the first part, the writer tries to convey the answer which he …more possesses to the question-“what separates Homo Sapiens from the other animals?” to the readers. Two traits that separate us from others anatomically are upright which leads the liberation of our hands and the extraordinarily huge brains. But that doesn’t main the genuine separation, the Homo Sapiens maintained an animal with no significance and were still too weak to compete with or even protect themselves from larger predators.
As we can see, there are apparently two ways to change the situation---the first one is tools or machines and the second is cooperation.The author focuses on the latter one. It was the Cognitive Revolution that made the Homo Sapiens scrambled from the middle to the top of the food chain, as cognitive abilities contains learning, remembering and communicating.
Like wolves and lions, many animals have the ability to cooperate within a relatively smaller number of members, but the Homo Sapiens can expand the limit many times. There are two reasons based on the most supple language in the world that we speak and our ability to conceive something that doesn’t have the real entity.
Firstly, that our language evolved as a way of gossiping as the picture below shows its importance. A group of 3 people has three interpersonal relationships. Taking
1 for example, he knows 2 and 3 directly in a face to face pattern. If he wants to know the relation of 2 and 3, then gossip plays its important role, it can replace the face- to- face communication. If a group has ‘10’ people, then there is ‘55’ interpersonal relations, 1 has to see’46’ relations that don’t include him to know the social network of the whole group. But Gossip makes it easier.

Secondly, as far as we know, only the Homo Sapiens has the ability to imagine and has the language to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. Suffice it to say that cooperation not only assembles the force, but also dilutes the risk. Only Sapiens achieve a more sophisticated cooperation by the collective imagine, in other words the story that convinces a huge number of strangers. I have never seen this opinion before I read the book, and I think it is explicit. Because the story doesn’t mean lie, more exactly it means prospect. People choose to believe the most profitable and the most reliable story according to their own judgements, which lead to corporations and parties. While the leaders, to some extent the storyteller, observe our bounded rationality and use common myths to control the cooperation.As the author says it leads to a inheritance upon the genome. From a basketball team of just 5 athletes and a coach, to a nation of millions of people, a collective imagination is the pillar of cooperation.
Many other animals is also reported of being able to using tools, so what is the difference between theirs and the Homo Sapiens? I think it is the imagine. The Homo Sapiens create tools to change the nature, but animals just use tools that exist naturally.
As the Cognitive Revolution is such important, what led to it? It was nature, maybe the mutation in our genomes, but who knows. As I major in Biology, what I think the scientists could do is just explaining the nature, learning from the nature, creating to adapt to the nature, and appreciating the nature. (less)