Traveling across millennia and cultures, The Invention of Yesterday argues that world history is a narrative we're constantly inventing. Fifty thousand years ago, we roamed the world as countless autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers, each one telling...

Traveling across millennia and cultures, The Invention of Yesterday argues that world history is a narrative we're constantly inventing. 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.

Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates how our propensity to invent a shared symbolic universe has shaped our journey from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age.