The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

Author: Tamim Ansary 

Publisher: PublicAffairs

ISBN: 9781405967143

Weight: 440 g

Pages: 454 pp

Year: 2026

Price: RM116

Through vivid stories studded with insights, award-winning author Tamim Ansary tells the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age.

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.

Traveling across millennia and cultures, The Invention of Yesterday illuminates our propensity to invent a shared symbolic universe, and argues that world history is a narrative we’re constantly inventing.