Yuval Harari’s “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” (2011) is a Big Think book, attempting to cover a vast range of subjects in a way that non-specialist readers can follow. In this case it’s the development of our species over the last 100,000 years, which means summarizing paleo-anthropology, archaeology, history, and sociology. It’s very easy to get key things wrong in such a broad survey, and scholars of these fields were unimpressed.

Nevertheless, there is an idea in the book that I have long agreed with, and so would like to say a bit more about – that humanity has brought a fifth order of being into the world.

Every child knows the first four orders:

• People – who can speak, and move, and grow
• Animals – who can move and grow
• Plants – who can grow
• Stuff – which just sits there.

This covers about all that you see in daily life.

So what would the next order up be? People have thought about this forever. There must be orders beyond us. Those are spirits and gods. They can do things that we long to do but can’t – read one another’s hearts, live forever, fly. Just as we make things, they must have made the world itself.

Yet there really are intangible beings in the world, and they really do dominate it. They are social organizations. They come in many flavors: governments, companies, schools, guilds and professional associations, clubs. They really can (theoretically) live forever, and some are millennia old. That’s far longer than any animal, and nearly up to extreme plant lifetimes. They do most of the work of the world.

An individual human being is a weak creature. A dog can live on its own in the woods for years, while a naked person wouldn’t last a month. Even hominids always lived in groups, as do the great apes. Hominid skills with fire and rocks were enough to let them spread out across Eurasia, but they still didn’t have the success of, say, bears.

It was only about ten to twenty thousand years ago that homo sapiens really started to rise. That happened with the domestication of dogs, and the rise of agriculture, and of metal working, and of stone structures. All of those need cooperation and education. One person might entice a wolf to sit by a campfire, but it’s only when the whole clan adopts them and uses them that dogs join human packs. You need a lot of people to clear and tend a field, and store its produce. No individual could figure out that green-ish rocks could turn into beautiful copper when melted, and was really handy for trading with other tribes. Having a big visible site like Göbekli Tepe full of stone monoliths was worth building if a lot of people could rendezvous there, and if a lot of people could help raise its huge weights.

By five thousand years ago most humans lived in riverine societies in China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Peru. They had become part of social groupings much larger and more powerful than, say, beehives or even termite mounds. Writing was then used to transfer information far more widely than speech could, and over far more time. It was then possible to organize hundreds of thousands of individuals to irrigate with the Euphrates or raise pyramids.

Today hardly any humans still live in simple hunter-gatherer bands. Only those in remote parts of the Amazon, Java, or the Kalahari still persist. Everyone else is in some social organization or other, and usually many. You personally are likely to have the natural mammal relationships of family, but also to work somewhere, and vote somewhere else, and be involved in some other social groups. Because they can draw upon thousands or even millions of human minds, they can handle tasks far beyond any single brain, and that has let them remake the planet. People are like the leaves of a tree in these organizations, growing on their own, but contributing to the whole.

These new beings are tough. Take one like the Humboldt University of Berlin. It was founded in 1809 and so is 216 years old. It was the leading scientific operation of the 19th century, boasting faculty of Schopenhauer, Planck, and Einstein. Then a third of its staff was purged by Nazi anti-semites, and it was bombed flat by the Allies. After the War it was split in half by the Berlin Wall. It came together again 45 years later in the German Reunification. Even a tree couldn’t survive such trauma, but it now has 40,000 students. 57 Nobelists have worked there. This is all pretty good, but not even all that old or large compared to political organizations.

Getting back to Harari, he has a dim view of the future of humanity. If we don’t extinguish ourselves, we’re likely to be replaced by robots and AI. Yet it seems to me that the future lies in this new class of being. I have no idea what will happen to homo sapiens, but we can see that social organizations are only gaining in power and sophistication. New organizational forms like parliaments and limited-liability corporations have proven to be far more effective than the older feudal courts and merchant guilds. Insights from sociology will tune them up even more. People will undoubtedly be changing too, but they will still need to operate inside organizations of some kind. If we ever leave the planet, it will be as part of great cooperating groups of people, not as individual hunters.