Excerpt from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Homo sapiens, too, belongs to a family. This banal fact used to be one of history's most closely guarded secrets. Homo sapiens long preferred to view itself as set apart from animals, an orphan bereft of family, lacking siblings or cousins, and most importantly, without parents. But that's just not the case. Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

Excerpt from Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari © 2015 by Yuval Noah Harari. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. without permission in writing from the publisher.