From language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how
humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age
Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of
cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows
that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won),
geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet)
as it is narrative.
Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small
autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the
wilderness, we began inventing stories--to organize for survival, to
find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these
became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when
various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced
everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence,
religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs.
Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates
the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent
and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our
ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the
reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.