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A radically immersive exploration of three pivotal moments in the evolution of human consciousness, asking what kinds of creatures humans were, are, and might yet be How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousness of perhaps the strangest animal of allâ??the human being. To experience the Upper Paleolithic eraâ??a turning point when humans became behaviorally modern, painting caves and telling stories, Foster learns what it feels like to be a Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer by living in makeshift shelters without amenities in the rural woods of England. He tests his five impoverished senses to forage for berries and roadkill and he undertakes shamanic journeys to explore the connection of wakeful dreaming to religion. For the Neolithic period, when humans stayed in one place and domesticated plants and animals, forever altering our connection to the natural world, he moves to a reconstructed Neolithic settlement. Finally, to explore the Enlightenmentâ??the age of reason and the end of the soulâ??Foster inspects Oxford colleges, dissecting rooms, cafes, and art galleries. He finds his world and himself bizarre and disembodied, and he rues the atrophy of our senses, the cause for much of what ails us. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, natural history, agriculture, medical law and ethics, Being a Human is one man's audacious attempt to feel a connection with 45,000 years of human history. This glorious, fiercely imaginative journey from our origins to a possible future ultimately shows how we might best live on earthâ??and thrive. A Macmillan Audio production from Metropolitan… (altro)
Foster has gone off the deep end, in the best way, with this one. The project of this book is to understand the experience of the Upper Paleolithic people and Neolithic people by modifying his way of life to mimic their lifestyle. The heart and soul of the book is the Upper Paleolithic section, which takes up a majority of the pages, proportional to the amount of human history that we spent wandering and watching and learning as that type of people. His Neolithic section is about compromise, about change, about the costs and benefits of a more stationary lifestyle, and his Enlightenment section is an attempt to reconcile all that with the rapid changes we’ve seen most recently.
He presents authoritative information on what people in those eras experienced, and writes about his own attempts in present tense. The redemption of this personal part of the story is the way he writes about the pubs and the buses. At first this seems counter intuitive. I almost wanted him to find a truly deserted place and pretend. But mentioning these details—the taxi trip back to his house, thinking about his family and his friends not so many miles away—allows him to move past them, and truly immerse himself in his project.
For lack of a better word, this is a ‘weird’ one. It is more philosophical stream of consciousness than any science or fact-based read. The author contemplates the evolution of the identity of ‘self’ from prehistoric times. And there is little detail on the ‘experiment’ of living rough in current times, which I would have liked to read more of. It is a slow read & I have been chewing off little bits at a time for months now. Buried in the wordiness, I have found a few gems, like his comment on how we humans used to communicate prior to cellphones and a few paragraphs on brain evolution. Thank you to the author and publisher for a free advanced reader's copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. ( )
A radically immersive exploration of three pivotal moments in the evolution of human consciousness, asking what kinds of creatures humans were, are, and might yet be How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousness of perhaps the strangest animal of allâ??the human being. To experience the Upper Paleolithic eraâ??a turning point when humans became behaviorally modern, painting caves and telling stories, Foster learns what it feels like to be a Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer by living in makeshift shelters without amenities in the rural woods of England. He tests his five impoverished senses to forage for berries and roadkill and he undertakes shamanic journeys to explore the connection of wakeful dreaming to religion. For the Neolithic period, when humans stayed in one place and domesticated plants and animals, forever altering our connection to the natural world, he moves to a reconstructed Neolithic settlement. Finally, to explore the Enlightenmentâ??the age of reason and the end of the soulâ??Foster inspects Oxford colleges, dissecting rooms, cafes, and art galleries. He finds his world and himself bizarre and disembodied, and he rues the atrophy of our senses, the cause for much of what ails us. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, natural history, agriculture, medical law and ethics, Being a Human is one man's audacious attempt to feel a connection with 45,000 years of human history. This glorious, fiercely imaginative journey from our origins to a possible future ultimately shows how we might best live on earthâ??and thrive. A Macmillan Audio production from Metropolitan
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(3.38)
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He presents authoritative information on what people in those eras experienced, and writes about his own attempts in present tense. The redemption of this personal part of the story is the way he writes about the pubs and the buses. At first this seems counter intuitive. I almost wanted him to find a truly deserted place and pretend. But mentioning these details—the taxi trip back to his house, thinking about his family and his friends not so many miles away—allows him to move past them, and truly immerse himself in his project.
Full review here (