Unstoppable Us, Volume 1: How Humans Took Over the World

Harari is an Israeli historian who specializes in global human history. He is the best-selling author of numerous books for a general audience. His adult books include Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015), 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI (2024). In 2022, he published his first book for children, Unstoppable Us, Volume 1.

A career academic, Harari holds a doctorate from Oxford University and is currently a lecturer in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents Honorary Award (2021), an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels (2020), and the Wenjin Book Award for his first monograph, Sapiens.

Harari is the co-founder of Sapienship, a “social impact company” that reflects his work as a public intellectual. The company’s mission is “to clarify the global conversation, focus attention on the most important challenges and support the quest for solutions” (Sapienship). This mission is supported by storytelling and educational projects that focus on worldwide problems including the climate crisis, global conflicts, and technological threats. This work helps to elucidate Harari’s beliefs and approaches, which are also apparent in his writings. As a result, Harari’s works center on “big history” or “macrohistory” (in contrast to “microhistory”), focusing on a shared human story and identity. He synthesizes knowledge from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences to explain the story of humanity’s evolution, explore patterns of behavior and belief, and dispel popular scientific misconceptions. 

In this educational and ideological context, Unstoppable Us addresses the fallacy that humans were inherently unique from the beginning and thus primed to dominate the world. Harari contests this creationist perspective by using scientific data, including archeological evidence, and historical analysis to show that humans were simply another animal and were weak in comparison to others. He also explains that there was diversity among early humans before proposing that evolutionary changes contributed to Homo sapiens’ successful rise and spread throughout the world. Their creativity and cooperative skills allowed Sapiens to eliminate other groups of humans, like Neanderthals, and caused the extinction of much of the world’s megafauna. Harari’s work emphasizes the relevance of this history. We can learn from past phenomena; while ancient humans had no awareness that their hunting caused animals’ extinction, contemporary humans have far more knowledge about the ecological and environmental impacts of our actions. Unstoppable Us directs Harari’s young audience to know their power and use it to advocate for causes that can change the world. Humanity’s “unstoppability,” Harari contends, may have damaging effects but also means that we are equipped to make positive changes to our world.