Yuval Harari was modest when subtitling his 2015 book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. I don’t know if 464 pages qualify as brief (it weighs 2.5 pounds), but I can tell you it’s the best book I’ve ever read. Bill Gates even has it in his top ten. It took me close to six months to finish it. The heavy material poses questions about who we are as homo sapiens. In case you didn’t know (my brother did because he was a biology major and super smart), there were SIX different species of humans on Earth at one time. SIX. And in an epic universal boxing match, homo sapiens won.

This book had me saying “wow” at least every other page and one revelation has changed how I look at evolution: wheat domesticated us. He makes this statement when diving into the Agricultural Revolution and how we went from nomads roaming from place to place to find food to finally settling down and creating settlements. Three words made my mind go boom.

I never thought about it like that. We know we have domesticated other animals, but I never thought about what domesticated us. Welcome to my brain, where it’s like riding Space Mountain but never-ending. This book has also caused some eyebrow-raising from my conservative Christian friends because it aims at how religion, empires, money, and war have shaped our lives. But I should note he doesn’t condemn any religion. He simply looks at the origins of most of the world’s major religions and connects the dots.

Dr. Harari quickly gets through the first 65,000 years of existence and spends most of the book looking back on the Scientific Revolution and how much we’ve advanced as a race. He also questions how things like artificial intelligence will affect (or threaten) our species’ existence in the future (and tackles it more in-depth in the follow-up book, Homo Deus).

You know a book is good when it ruffles feathers in the scientific community, and this book did just that. Harari isn’t a scientist; he’s a history professor. But, even amongst the scientist, even one declared it “important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens.” While scientists want hypotheses proven and an end to a problem, this book leaves you wanting to learn more. It’s thought-provoking, and I found myself with more questions, which I consider the best learning.

It’s worth a read, and maybe it’ll blow your mind, too.