Where Sapiens is strongest is exactly where historians push back

The shared-fiction thesis, that money, nations and companies work because enough people believe in them, is the book's most quoted idea and its most useful one.

Working historians have been more critical than the general readership. The Agricultural Revolution as history's biggest fraud is a striking line, but it compresses several thousand years and enormous regional variation into a single verdict. Specialists have objected that the sweep comes at the cost of accuracy in nearly every chapter they know well.

That tension is worth sitting with rather than resolving. A book that is wrong in the details can still hand you a frame you keep using, and a book that is careful in every detail can leave you with nothing portable.

For those who know one of these periods properly: which chapter did the book get wrong in a way that mattered?