The usual book suggested with many counterclaims which is less famous is "The Dawn of everything". A beautiful read and a lot clearer on what is research and what is opinion.
I have struggled greatly with that book, and finally set it down so that I could pick up some other books in my reading queue and enjoy reading again.
I don't have detailed notes for what I've disliked about it. When I pick it up again, I'll start from the beginning and keep a log. But, broadly, the authors make a great deal of claims that are unsupported by their fields of study and they don't consult with people from other fields of study. Also, at least up to the point that I had read it, the far East was entirely absent from any mention of human history, which seems like quite a grave oversight given the kind of book it set out to be.
FWIW, a good friend of mine is a recently-degreed archaeologist, does cultural anthropological work, and I was able to reliably get her wound up with excerpts from the book.
My impression is that the authors started out with some particular ideologies of their own, and sought to support those ideologies with evidence from their fields. ...which is fine, but it's not what I was expecting from it. The book is pronounced on places like HN as a must-read re-examination of human history, but framed in that way, it's not a very good book (IMO).
As far as I can tell, Sapiens the anthropology magazine is unrelated to Sapiens, the book. The value of its contents should probably be evaluated along with the field as a whole (which tends to fit somewhere between archaeology and sociology on the Science Field Mohs scale).
I haven't read The Dawn of Everything, but I have read other Graeber books. His ideas are interesting, but "clear on what is research and what is opinion" is not the impression I would take away. "Willing to draw grand conclusions about the arc of history from research based on tiny, unrepresentative data sets" is more like it.
> Neanderthals were more inclined to stay in their family groups and were warier of new people.
In the absence of living Neanderthals to study or written records describing them, I don't see how what's stated there about their thoughts and mental attitudes could be known at all, let alone with such certainty.
Archeological evidence might be able to say they tended stay in their family group, but it seems like a speculative leap to say they did so for particular subtle psychological reasons.
> ...given that they were genetically disposed to being less friendly to those beyond their immediate family.
I'm no expert on genetics, but I'm skeptical any kind of existing genetic analysis could give that kind of behavioral detail.
> SAPIENS is a publication of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and published in partnership with the University of Chicago Press, while maintaining unconditional editorial independence.
Their advisory board is all university people from across the world; from a distance it seems pretty legit to me.
Not for Harari or Pinker readers, see here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/23/the-dawn-of-ev...?