Invention of Yesterday
Fifty thousand years ago, we roamed the world as countless autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers, each one telling itself a story of the world with itself at the center. We used narratives to organize for survival and explain the unfathomable, and these stories evolved into the bases for cultures, empires, and civilizations. When disparate narratives collided, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs. In this updated edition with a new postscript, Tamim Ansary uses insightful, vivid stories to illuminate how our propensity to invent a shared symbolic universe has shaped our journey from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age.