Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Prehistory Narratives”

After reading Harari’s description of human quality of life during different periods of prehistory, students demonstrate their understanding by creating two contrasting narratives centered on the daily life of a typical person.

In Sapiens, Harari explains how various prehistoric changes in human society impacted human quality of life. In this activity, you will choose two distinct eras in prehistory and create a character from each period. Then, you will write a narrative focused on a typical day in each character’s life, using details from both Harari’s book and your own imagination.

• Choose two time periods in which human quality of life is distinctly different.
• Create a character for each period.

o Your characters should be average people for their eras, not people whose backgrounds would make them part of a small minority.

o Decide what kind of tasks your characters would encounter in a typical day—are they hunters, gatherers, farmers, merchants, etc.?

o Decide what kind of person each character is—are they ambitious? lazy? anxious? carefree? sociable? introverted? etc.

o Imagine what your characters worry about and dream about and how they feel about their lives.

• Write two narratives of 1-2 pages each.

o Show your characters going through a typical day. Make sure that your choices are consistent with details in Harari’s book and demonstrate how quality of life differs in the two eras you have chosen.

o Use descriptive detail to give your reader a strong sense of setting. Make sure that these details are consistent with Harari’s text.

o Use exposition and internal monologue to give your reader a sense of your characters’ inner lives, backgrounds, and personalities.

o If it makes sense for your characters to interact with others, show this happening and use dialogue effectively to propel plot, characterize people, establish background information, etc.

Teaching Suggestion: This assignment requires students to apply details from Harari’s text to a novel context of their own creation. If you sense that your students might struggle with creating specific narratives from the generalizations in Sapiens, you might model the assignment by offering an example narrative and explaining how textual details have shaped this narrative. You can adjust the time required for this assignment by increasing or decreasing the number of time periods students are asked to cover, or by increasing or decreasing the length of each resulting narrative.

 Differentiation Suggestion: Students with anxiety or other emotional conditions that make choosing among many alternatives difficult may benefit from being assigned characters and time periods or from being given a firm deadline for making these choices themselves before assigned choices are issued. These students, as well as students with attentional and executive function issues, may benefit from filling out graphic organizers that ask for defined details from the text that will contribute to their final narratives. English language learners, as well as students who struggle with written expression, might be offered the choice to write shorter narratives than those assigned to the rest of the class.