The Invention of Yesterday

A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

By: Tamim Ansary

Narrated by: Tamim Ansary

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.

©2019 Tamim Ansary (P)2019 PublicAffairs

Must read!

Is you loved sapients this is a must, the interconnection of history and geography is mind blowing

Important perspective to be aware of

The author offers a great insight inside into the history of history of architecture and human nature. It is an important perspective to be aware of and understand is it makes history and our past and culture More predictive and understood.

My favorite book of the year

I loved this book! So many awesome insights and stories, with masterful wit throughout. Great book!

Fascinating and very pithy - but not too heavy going

It’s not easy to write a world history, and make it so fact filled and compelling at the same time, and I dare say fun to read also. But the author was wildly successful in accomplishing all this, and I really enjoyed every moment of this book. I highly recommend it to anybody who is interested in history and wants learn.

Truly perfect

I will listen to this more than once. Such wonderfully researched and thoughtfully constructed analysis of where we came from.

Excellent and incredibly approachable project

I thoroughly enjoyed this and have already listened to many parts a second time. I think that if you are coming to it with a desire to understand what it means to shape a story of our history it is especially rewarding. The reading is very even and i was able to stay totally engaged without feeling like it lost intonation or became I engaging.

I heard an interview with the author that really convinced me of the importance and necessity of try to tell a story for this moment of our past that empowers us to think at the scale of the global - but with an understanding of our deep common history. I love that he did it with true grace and am very inspired.

Highly recommend for those who feel intimidated by history - I feel like this gives me a handle on so much by telling even the history I knew from a different point of view that will empower my curiosity moving forward towards so much that I both was familiar with or had never heard.

I am very grateful to the author for caring so much for our common history, and his peaceful and humanitarian desire truly touched me through this reading.

Amazing

Amazing book. Great overview of history of civilizations, with interesting concepts and facts, and story. The author is a real intellectual, not a ideologically driven academic

Best world history I've ever read

I have read many history books. Almost always they are written from the European or American point of view, as if nothing else mattered. Rarely do they describe Native American history, or Chinese, or Muslim, or African, even though their histories are rich, eloquent, and wonderful. I learned a lot. Tamim Ansary has many insights. Most of all, this book offers us a new pair of glasses. Once you put them on, the whole world looks different.

A spectacular book on human history

Brilliantly combines vast range and depth with clear expression of fundamental truths about human life. We build our worlds and traditions in language, blending, merging and evolving across the arc of history, and into the future. A brilliant read and highly recommended. (Great narration by the author brings his enjoyable writing style even more to life.)

Highly recommend!

A Fascinating view of the rise and fall of human cultures and their interaction. It is helping me to look at our current situation in a different light.