A Brief History of Humankind

Historian Yuval Noah Harari was awarded the Polonsky Prize for Creativity in the Humanistic Disciplines. His magnum opus 'Sapiens' challenges everything we know about being human – our thoughts, our actions, our power, and our future.

In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical - and sometimes devastating - breakthroughs of the cognitive, agricultural and scientific revolutions.

Harari invites us to not only connect past developments with present challenges, but to question our basic narratives of the world; and to imagine how humankind will use its power to create in the decades to come.

Speaker: Yuval Noah Harari, lecturer in world history, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Chair: Tom Feilden, science & environment correspondent, BBC Radio 4 Today programme.