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Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness
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 all--the human being.
To experience the Upper Paleolithic era--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 Enlightenment--the age of reason and the end of the soul--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 earth--and thrive.
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 all--the human being.
To experience the Upper Paleolithic era--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 Enlightenment--the age of reason and the end of the soul--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 earth--and thrive.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published August 26, 2021
About the author
Charles Foster
134 books95 followersCharles Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford. He is a qualified veterinarian, teaches medical law and ethics, and is a practicing barrister. Much of his life has been spent on expeditions: he has run a 150-mile race in the Sahara, skied to the North Pole, and suffered injuries in many desolate and beautiful landscapes. He has written on travel, evolutionary biology, natural history, anthropology, and philosophy.
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August 11, 2022
We think of wilderness as an absence of sound, movement and event. We rent our rural cottages ‘for a bit of peace and quiet.’ That shows how switched off we are. A country walk should be a deafening, threatening, frantic, exhausting cacophony.--------------------------------------
If today’s shorn, burned, poisoned apology for wilderness should do that to us, just think what the real wild, if it still existed, would do. It’d be like taking an industrial cocktail of speed, heroin and LSD and dancing through a club that’s playing the Mozart Requiem to the beat of the Grateful Dead, expecting every moment to have your belly unzipped by a cave bear.
All humans are Sheherazades: we die each morning if we don’t have a good story to tell, and the good ones are all old.Up for a bit of time travel? No, no, no, not in the sci-fi sense of physically transporting to another era. But in the mostly imaginary sense of picturing oneself in a prior age. Well, maybe more than just picturing, maybe picturing with the addition of some visceral experience. Charles Foster has written about what life is like for otters, badgers, foxes, deer and swifts, by living like them for a time. He wrote about those experiences in his book, Being a Beast. He wonders, here, how experiencing life as a Paleolithic and a Neolithic person can inform our current understanding of ourselves.
I thought that, if I knew where I came from, that might shed some light on what I am…It’s a prolonged thought experiment and non-thought experiment, set in woods, waves, moorlands, schools, abattoirs, wattle-and-daub huts, hospitals, rivers, cemeteries, caves, farms, kitchens, the bodies of crows, museums, breaches, laboratories, medieval dining halls, Basque eating houses, fox-hunts, temples, deserted Middle Eastern cities and shaman’s caravans.
Charles Foster - image from Oxford University
His journey begins with (and he spends the largest portion of the book on) the Upper Paleolithic (U-P) era, aka the Late Stone Age, from 50,000 to 12,000 years ago, when we became, behaviorally, modern humans. Foster is quite a fan of the period, seeing it as some sort of romantic heyday for humanity, one in which we were more fully attuned with the environments in which we lived, able to use our senses to their capacity, instead of getting by with the vastly circumscribed functionality we have today.
Interested in the birth of human consciousness, he puts himself, and his 12 yo son, Tom, not only into the mindset of late Paleolithic humans, but into their lives. He and Tom live wild in Derbyshire, doing their best to ignore the sounds of passing traffic, while living on roadkill (well, I guess they do not entirely ignore traffic) and the bounty of the woods. They deal with hunger, the need for shelter, and work on becoming attuned to their new old world.
We’re not making the wood into our image: projecting ourselves onto it. It’s making us. If we let it.In one stretch Foster fasts for eight days, which helps bring on a hallucinatory state (intentionally). Shamanism is a major cultural element in the U-P portrait he paints. It is clearly not his first trip. He recalls an out-of-body experience he had while in hospital, the sort where one is looking down from the ceiling at one’s physical body, seeing this as of a cloth with a broader capacity for human experience. He relates this also to the cave paintings of the era, seeing them, possibly, as the end-product of shamanic tripping. This section of the book transported me back to the 1960s and the probably apocryphal books of Carlos Castaneda.
Social grooming was important to ancestors of our species. But, with our enlarged brains able to handle, maybe, a community of 150 people, grooming became too cost-intensive.
To maintain a group that size strictly by grooming, we’d have to groom for about 43% percent of our time, which would be deadly. Something else had to make up for the shortfall, and other things have. We have developed a number of other endorphin-releasing, bond-forming strategies that don’t involve touching [social distancing?]. They are…laughter, wordless singing/dancing, language and ritual/religion/story.It sure gives the expression rubbed me the wrong way some added heft.
He has theories about religion, communication, and social organization that permeate this exploration. He posits, for example, that late Paleo man was able to communicate with a language unlike our own, a more full-body form of expression, maybe some long-lost form of charades. There is an ancient language, thought to have been used by Neanderthals, called HMMM, or holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and memetic communication. It is likely that some of this carried forward. And makes one wonder just how far back the roots go to contemporary languages that incorporate more rather than less musicality, more rather than less tonality, and more rather than less bodily support for spoken words.
He writes about a time when everything, not just people, were seen as having a soul, some inner self that exists separately, although living within a body, a tree, a hare, a blade of grass. This sort of worldview makes it a lot tougher to hunt for reasons that did not involve survival. And makes understandable rituals in many cultures in which forgiveness is begged when an animal is killed. This becomes much more of a thing when one feels in tune with one’s surroundings, an experience Foster reports as being quite real in his Derbyshire adventure. This tells him that Paleo man was better able to sense, to be aware of his surroundings than almost any modern human can.
Foster has a go at the Neolithic as well, trying to see what the shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture was like, and offers consideration of the longer-term impacts on humanity that emanated from that change. This is much less involved and involving, but does include some very interesting observations on how agriculture revolutionized the relationship people had with their environment.
…the first evidence of sedentary communities comes from around 11,000 years ago. We see the first evidence of domesticated plants and animals at about the same time. Yet, it is not for another 7,000 years that there are settled villages, relying on domesticated plants or fixed fields. For 7,000 years, that is, our own model of human life, which we like to assume would have been irresistibly attractive to the poor benighted caveman, was resisted or ignored, just as it is by more modern hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers only become like us at the end of a whip. Our life is a last resort for the creatures that we really are.He notes that even when farming took root, many of those newly minted farmers continued living as hunter-gatherers for part of the year.
He finishes up with a glance at the contemporary. More of a screed really. He notes that phonetic writing severed the connection our languages have with the reality they seek to portray. Pre-phonetic languages tend to be more onomatopoeic, the sounds more closely reflecting the underlying reality. He sees our modern brains as functioning mostly as valves, channeling all available sensation through a narrow pipeline, while leaving behind an entire world of possible human experience that we are no longer equipped to handle. To that extent we all have super-powers, of potential awareness, anyway, that lie waiting for someone to open the right valve, presuming they have not been corroded into inutility by disuse. He tells of meeting a French woman in Thailand whose near-death experience left her passively able to disrupt electronic mechanisms. She could not, for example, use ATMs. They would always malfunction around her.
He takes a run at what is usually seen to indicate “modern” humanity.
I’ve come to wonder whether symbolism is all it’s cracked up to be, and in particular whether its use really is the great watershed separating us from everything else that had gone before.He argues that trackers, for example, can abstract from natural clues the stories behind them, and those existed long before so-called “modern man.”
He calls in outside authorities from time to time to fill in gaps. These extra bits always add fascinating pieces of information. For example,
Later I wrote in panic to biologist David Haskell, an expert on birdsong, begging him to reassure me that music is ‘chronologically and neurologically prior to language.’ It surely is, he replied. ‘It seems that preceding both is bodily motion: the sound-controlling centers of the brain are derived from the same parts of the embryo as the limb motor system, so all vocal expression grows from the roots that might be called dance or, less loftily, shuffling about.Foster is that most common of writers, a veterinarian and a lawyer. Wait, what? Sadly, there is no telling in here (it is present in his Wiki page, though) of how he managed to train for these seemingly unrelated careers. (I can certainly envision a scenario, though, in which we hear lawyer Foster proclaiming to the court, “My client could not possibly be guilty of this crime, your honor. The forensic evidence at the scene clearly shows that the act was committed by an American badger, while my client, as anyone can see, is a Eurasian badger.”) It certainly seems clear, though, from his diatribes against modernity, where his heart is. In the visceral, physical work of dealing with animals, which lends itself to the intellectual stimulation of a truer, and deeper connection with nature.
The first time (and one of the only times) I felt useful was shoveling cow shit in a Peak District farm when I was ten. It had a dignity that piano lessons, cub scouts, arithmetic and even amateur taxidermy did not. What I was detecting was that humans acquire their significance from relationship, that relationships with non-humans were vital and that clearing up someone’s dung is a good way of establishing relationships.In that case, I am far more useful in the world than I ever dreamed.
GRIPES
Foster can be off-putting, particularly to those us with no love of hunting, opening as he does with I first ate a live mammal on a Scottish hill. (Well, as least it wasn’t haggis.) I can well imagine many readers slamming the book shut at that point and moving on to something else. Will this be a paean to a manly killing impulse? Thankfully, not really, although there are some uncomfortable moments re the hunting of living creatures.
Sometimes he puts things out that are at the very least questionable, and at the worst, silly. Our intuition is older, wiser and more reliable than our underused, atrophied senses. Really? Based on what data? So, making decisions by feelz alone is the way to go? Maybe I should swap my accountant for an inveterate gambler?
He sometimes betrays an unconscious unkindness in the cloak of humor:
The last thing I ate was a hedgehog. That was nine days ago. From the taste of them, hedgehogs must start decomposing even when they’re alive and in their prime. This one’s still down there somewhere, and my burps smell like a maggot farm. I regret it’s death under the wheels of a cattle truck far more than its parents or children possibly do.I doubt it.
One stylistic element that permeates is seeing an imaginary Paleo man, X, and his son. Supposedly these might be Foster and Tom in an earlier era. It has some artistic appeal, but I did not think it added much overall.
All that said, the overall take here is that this is high-octane fuel for the brain, however valved-up ours may be. Foster raises many incredibly fascinating subjects from the origins of religion, language, our native capabilities to how global revolutions have molded us into the homo sap of the 21st century. This is a stunning wakeup call for any minds that might have drifted off into the intellectual somnolence of contemporary life. There are simply so many ideas bouncing off the walls in this book that one might fear that they could reach a critical mass and do some damage. It is worth the risk. If you care at all about understanding humanity, our place in the world, and how we got here, skipping Being a Human would be…well…inhuman. It is an absolute must-read.
We try to learn the liturgy: the way to do things properly; the way to avoid offending the fastidious, prescriptive and vengeful guardians of the place. Everything matters. We watch the rain fall on one leaf, trace the course of the water under a stone, and then we go back to the leaf and watch the next drop. We try to know the stamens with the visual resolution of a bumblebee and the snail slime with the nose of a bankvole and the leaf pennants on the tree masts with the cold eyes of kites.
Review posted – 9/17/21
Publication dates
----------Hardcover - 8/31/21
----------Trade paperback - 8/9/22
This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!
I received an ARE of Being a Human from Metropolitan Books in return for a modern era review. Thanks, Maia.
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, and Twitter pages
By my count this is Foster’s 39th book
Foster’s bio on Wiki
Charles Foster (born 1962) is an English writer, traveller, veterinarian, taxidermist, barrister and philosopher. He is known for his books and articles on Natural History, travel (particularly in Africa and the Middle East), theology, law and medical ethics. He is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. He says of his own books: 'Ultimately they are all presumptuous and unsuccessful attempts to answer the questions 'who or what are we?', and 'what on earth are we doing here?'Interviews
-----The Guardian - Going underground: meet the man who lived as an animal - re Being a Beast by Simon Hattenston
-----New Books Network - Defined by Relationship by Howard Burton – audio - 1h 30m
Items of Interest from the author
-----Emergence Magazine - Against Nature Writing - on language as a barrier to understanding
-----Shortform - Charles Foster's Top Book Recommendations
Items of Interest
-----Wiki on Bear Grylls - a British adventurer – mentioned in Part 1 as an example of someone more interested in the technology of survival than the point of it (p 62 in my ARE)
-----Wiki on Yggdrasil - mentioned in Part 1 – humorously (p 85)
-----Wiki on the Upper Paleolithic
-----Dartmouth Department of Music – a review of a book positing that Neanderthals used musicality in their communications Review Feature - The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body by Steven Mithen - Foster addresses this in this discussion of the origins of human language
-----Wiki on Carlos Castaneda
-----Discover Magazine - Paleomythic: How People Really Lived During the Stone Age By Marlene Zuk Like it says – an interesting read
November 5, 2021
I wrote a long review and accidentally deleted it. So an effort not to have to write the whole thing over again I will be a bit more to the point. I had two issues with this book. One, although subjectivity is to be expected in any assessment of History the extent of subjectivity in this book, really romanticizing the lives of upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, is too starry eyed for my taste. Evolution is responsive and adaptable, it is not teological. There is no best human possible, no true human, garden of Eden lost innocence. These are remnants of a reactionary, quasi religious attitudes. Civilizations and society have their own cycles which do not follow collective intentions from point A to point B.
I can certainly agree that several of the adaptations civilization took on as a result of the agricultural and industrial revolutions have been detrimental in the Modern Mind, it's only from a viewpoint of hindsight. We have the benefit of standing on our modern sensibility outside as a spectator while we evaluate the left turns we took as a species. We cannot judge from within their experiences. In some ways, we can lament the worst of our modern lives without contrasting heavily with an idealized beautiful past, one free from brutalizing elements, short lives, and tenuous existence... can we not? Calibrate.
Secondly, it just wasn't very original. When you read a lot of nonfiction you start to hear the same scholarship referenced again and again. He draws heavily from Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Sapiens, Iain Gilchrist, David Abram and other writers. And although he synthesizes this into a very personal journal of his experiences of trying to inhabit the minds of hunter gatherers through the Enlightenment, all his premises are unthoughtful or rehashed. I'm not trying to be unfairly critical, it's not god awful bad, but I just have heard it before. His prose had it moments but most of it was dull. I almost marked this did-not-finish as I found it boring but since it was not a long read I decided to plow through. Now, this can only be my opinion, philosophy and specific taste. After all, it's completely what you're bringing to the book you're reading, is it relevant to you or not? Many might enjoy this book depending on what you are looking for.
I can certainly agree that several of the adaptations civilization took on as a result of the agricultural and industrial revolutions have been detrimental in the Modern Mind, it's only from a viewpoint of hindsight. We have the benefit of standing on our modern sensibility outside as a spectator while we evaluate the left turns we took as a species. We cannot judge from within their experiences. In some ways, we can lament the worst of our modern lives without contrasting heavily with an idealized beautiful past, one free from brutalizing elements, short lives, and tenuous existence... can we not? Calibrate.
Secondly, it just wasn't very original. When you read a lot of nonfiction you start to hear the same scholarship referenced again and again. He draws heavily from Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Sapiens, Iain Gilchrist, David Abram and other writers. And although he synthesizes this into a very personal journal of his experiences of trying to inhabit the minds of hunter gatherers through the Enlightenment, all his premises are unthoughtful or rehashed. I'm not trying to be unfairly critical, it's not god awful bad, but I just have heard it before. His prose had it moments but most of it was dull. I almost marked this did-not-finish as I found it boring but since it was not a long read I decided to plow through. Now, this can only be my opinion, philosophy and specific taste. After all, it's completely what you're bringing to the book you're reading, is it relevant to you or not? Many might enjoy this book depending on what you are looking for.
November 21, 2021
This book was extremely frustrating.
I suppose I was under the impression that I'd be getting something very different out of it having found it in the science section. Expectations aside, the author managed to attempt a fresh look at the human conscious experience through the various stages in our history from hunter-gatherers to the modern industrial world.
It seemed to me like an novel idea and approach were there, I just felt constantly conflicted while reading. The prose was kind of fun, smooth, entertaining and unique. And yet it was also wandering, feeling often aimless in it's meandering between pedantic rants, spiritual, waxing poetic ideologies, and long bouts about their father-son camping trips. As a matter of fact, a lot of this book seems to me to be about them going camping and then drawing enormous, overzealous conclusions. I would find myself starring paragraphs feeling enthralled by the simplicity and beauty of certain re-conceptions of human history and thought just to be angered by misrepresented science on the next page. I went back and forth between enjoying the book, to wanting to throw it across the room.
What really bothered me was that the author was attempting this anti-progress perspective to attack our conceptions of the use of rationality, science, and language while at the same time deploying scientific endeavors and about as many big words as he could muster to make the argument. It was as if he was against language as a tool for knowledge while simultaneously enjoying the deployment of his linguistic skills and literary references in this flaunting academic onanism. Couldn't you speak more plainly if your desire is to convey the simple elegance of nature and of the people that were more in tune with it rather than act upset about the very thing you yourself are perpetrating?
Yes, I know that the author was aware of his own inundation in the very world he argued against. I just wanted there to be more balance and honesty rather than what felt like self-annihilating, cover up, romanticized rambling around what was essentially a series of camping trips and hikes. The title itself was laced with this pretension and the introduction or whatever it is clearly states this incredibly difficult and interesting objective in a well-written and concise way. It's a great sales pitch that just didn't quite come through for me.
Like I said, I'm at least partially with you here though, Charles. Dogma doesn't belong in science or history and much of what you say is quite appealing. I really enjoyed that cringey portion about the dinner with the professor. Very courageous. However, there are many points that I must disagree with at this moment, especially with regard to your conception of some pure beginning, of some imagined moment in human history of complete harmony with nature and purity of spirit. This idea itself in the child of the Christian narrative of the fall of man. So re-vamping this story as man's fall from nature is non-unique and extremely contestable.
Here's my distilled take away:
This book has decent snippets that are good to think about. It's a novel way to conceptualize human history and consciousness through experiential and philosophical lens. It is also a book that is mostly about going camping. Clear in objective and then vague throughout the execution.
This book is something to read and discuss, approached with a grain of salt. I would give it two and half stars if I could because it belongs right at the intersection of good and bad.
I suppose I was under the impression that I'd be getting something very different out of it having found it in the science section. Expectations aside, the author managed to attempt a fresh look at the human conscious experience through the various stages in our history from hunter-gatherers to the modern industrial world.
It seemed to me like an novel idea and approach were there, I just felt constantly conflicted while reading. The prose was kind of fun, smooth, entertaining and unique. And yet it was also wandering, feeling often aimless in it's meandering between pedantic rants, spiritual, waxing poetic ideologies, and long bouts about their father-son camping trips. As a matter of fact, a lot of this book seems to me to be about them going camping and then drawing enormous, overzealous conclusions. I would find myself starring paragraphs feeling enthralled by the simplicity and beauty of certain re-conceptions of human history and thought just to be angered by misrepresented science on the next page. I went back and forth between enjoying the book, to wanting to throw it across the room.
What really bothered me was that the author was attempting this anti-progress perspective to attack our conceptions of the use of rationality, science, and language while at the same time deploying scientific endeavors and about as many big words as he could muster to make the argument. It was as if he was against language as a tool for knowledge while simultaneously enjoying the deployment of his linguistic skills and literary references in this flaunting academic onanism. Couldn't you speak more plainly if your desire is to convey the simple elegance of nature and of the people that were more in tune with it rather than act upset about the very thing you yourself are perpetrating?
Yes, I know that the author was aware of his own inundation in the very world he argued against. I just wanted there to be more balance and honesty rather than what felt like self-annihilating, cover up, romanticized rambling around what was essentially a series of camping trips and hikes. The title itself was laced with this pretension and the introduction or whatever it is clearly states this incredibly difficult and interesting objective in a well-written and concise way. It's a great sales pitch that just didn't quite come through for me.
Like I said, I'm at least partially with you here though, Charles. Dogma doesn't belong in science or history and much of what you say is quite appealing. I really enjoyed that cringey portion about the dinner with the professor. Very courageous. However, there are many points that I must disagree with at this moment, especially with regard to your conception of some pure beginning, of some imagined moment in human history of complete harmony with nature and purity of spirit. This idea itself in the child of the Christian narrative of the fall of man. So re-vamping this story as man's fall from nature is non-unique and extremely contestable.
Here's my distilled take away:
This book has decent snippets that are good to think about. It's a novel way to conceptualize human history and consciousness through experiential and philosophical lens. It is also a book that is mostly about going camping. Clear in objective and then vague throughout the execution.
This book is something to read and discuss, approached with a grain of salt. I would give it two and half stars if I could because it belongs right at the intersection of good and bad.
August 31, 2021
Being a Human by Charles Foster is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in early August.
Foster takes a deep, near-poetic intellectual tone (with a twinge of wit) when describing early humankind through the ages and the concepts of hunting, cave art, migration. shamanic rituals and prophecy, intercommunication, and higher thought through written language. It has the potential to be really great if it didn't ponder or hypothesize as much. Maybe this means I'd like Being a Beast more?
Foster takes a deep, near-poetic intellectual tone (with a twinge of wit) when describing early humankind through the ages and the concepts of hunting, cave art, migration. shamanic rituals and prophecy, intercommunication, and higher thought through written language. It has the potential to be really great if it didn't ponder or hypothesize as much. Maybe this means I'd like Being a Beast more?
August 10, 2021
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.
September 1, 2021
Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.
Being a Human is a meandering nearly stream-of-consciousness look at human development over the last forty thousand (or so) years and examining three ages of human-ness along the way. Released 31st Aug 2021 by Macmillan on their Metropolitan imprint, it's 400 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately; it makes it so easy to find information with the search function.
This is an eccentric book; beautifully written and oddly moving in a lot of places. The prose is a lot more prose-like than most nonfiction books I've encountered and I enjoyed the cadence of the author's voice very much. I can imagine that he would be outside the usual standard-operating-fare as a lecturer, and I envy his students. He manages to traverse the metaphorical Strait of Messina without straying into "aw, shucks" self deprecation or pedagogical pomposity, no mean feat.
The book covers a massive amount of time (obviously) and is arranged more or less chronologically: Upper Paleolithic (in four parts), Neolithic (ditto), and the current age looking toward the future. I found myself continually distracted during the reading by the enlightening and copious annotations and notes. After the first bit, I decided to ignore the notes and links and just read the information, making notes of the bits I really wanted to delve into more deeply later. That seemed to really help with continuity and flow and reading enjoyment.
As stated, the book is copiously annotated and the chapter notes provide a wealth of further reading for readers wishing to deep dive in the material. The bibliography is massive (though, as the author says, impossibly abbreviated since a real bibliography would include everything ever written by or about human beings).
I enjoyed this read immensely. I would heartily recommend it for lovers of science philosophy, anthropology, but maybe not so much for readers looking for "just the facts, Ma'am". This has been one of my better nonfiction reads for 2021.
Five stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
Being a Human is a meandering nearly stream-of-consciousness look at human development over the last forty thousand (or so) years and examining three ages of human-ness along the way. Released 31st Aug 2021 by Macmillan on their Metropolitan imprint, it's 400 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately; it makes it so easy to find information with the search function.
This is an eccentric book; beautifully written and oddly moving in a lot of places. The prose is a lot more prose-like than most nonfiction books I've encountered and I enjoyed the cadence of the author's voice very much. I can imagine that he would be outside the usual standard-operating-fare as a lecturer, and I envy his students. He manages to traverse the metaphorical Strait of Messina without straying into "aw, shucks" self deprecation or pedagogical pomposity, no mean feat.
The book covers a massive amount of time (obviously) and is arranged more or less chronologically: Upper Paleolithic (in four parts), Neolithic (ditto), and the current age looking toward the future. I found myself continually distracted during the reading by the enlightening and copious annotations and notes. After the first bit, I decided to ignore the notes and links and just read the information, making notes of the bits I really wanted to delve into more deeply later. That seemed to really help with continuity and flow and reading enjoyment.
As stated, the book is copiously annotated and the chapter notes provide a wealth of further reading for readers wishing to deep dive in the material. The bibliography is massive (though, as the author says, impossibly abbreviated since a real bibliography would include everything ever written by or about human beings).
I enjoyed this read immensely. I would heartily recommend it for lovers of science philosophy, anthropology, but maybe not so much for readers looking for "just the facts, Ma'am". This has been one of my better nonfiction reads for 2021.
Five stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
August 21, 2021
I won an ARC of this one in a Goodreads Giveaway. There are a lot of stream of consciousness ramblings on the part of the author, which isn't something that I typically associate with non-fiction. I was hoping for a more academic take on the exploration of consciousness when I entered the giveaway for this one, and I have to admit that the lack of a scholarly tone to the book was a real bummer. There's still some fascinating information in here, but it's not the book for me. It comes off as though it's being written in a blog-like format, and that's not something I have an interest in keeping on my shelves.
October 7, 2022
This is the second book in row I've read, by happenstance, to argue that humans were more in touch with our true selves--and lived happier, more meaningful and fulfilling lives--as hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric era. That the advent of agriculture, domestication, settlements, and civilization tapped into our worst elements and we've been dissatisfied ever since. The ability to store resources led to the hoarding of resources; the need for organized, coordinated communities led to the hoarding of power; and hoarded resources and power have led to fighting, greed, selfishness, and many other ills that didn't exist before. So goes the argument.
Foster takes a unique approach to making his case: he lived it. He identified three broad eras of human existence, ways of living that led to different modes of thinking and being, and did his best to live in each manner. Upper Palaeolithic hunting and gathering; living off the land in the wild with no modern tools, finding food and shelter as he went. Neolithic farming; in the traditional ways. Enlightenment; modern life. He reports on each experience, alongside reflections drawing insight from academic work in a range of subjects.
Foster is a skilled and entertaining writer, and his book is fascinating.
I would have rated it higher but for two reasons. First, he claims from the start that he is exploring different modes of existence and reporting on them, but really he is looking to confirm his beliefs with his experiences. His enterprise was based too much on proving his points and not enough on learning. Second, I listened to the audiobook, often as I was doing things with my hands (whittling, painting, crafty things) so my attention was always a little bit divided. From that perspective, I found his style a bit too rambling and hard to follow. I think if I had been reading exclusively, with more attention to headings and titles and the ability to reread and create more context inside the book, I might have felt differently. Is it fair to base my rating on my engagement with the book? Probably not, but it's all I have to go on.
A fascinating, if not entirely convincing, read.
A bit from his Author's Note that opens the book:
Foster takes a unique approach to making his case: he lived it. He identified three broad eras of human existence, ways of living that led to different modes of thinking and being, and did his best to live in each manner. Upper Palaeolithic hunting and gathering; living off the land in the wild with no modern tools, finding food and shelter as he went. Neolithic farming; in the traditional ways. Enlightenment; modern life. He reports on each experience, alongside reflections drawing insight from academic work in a range of subjects.
Foster is a skilled and entertaining writer, and his book is fascinating.
I would have rated it higher but for two reasons. First, he claims from the start that he is exploring different modes of existence and reporting on them, but really he is looking to confirm his beliefs with his experiences. His enterprise was based too much on proving his points and not enough on learning. Second, I listened to the audiobook, often as I was doing things with my hands (whittling, painting, crafty things) so my attention was always a little bit divided. From that perspective, I found his style a bit too rambling and hard to follow. I think if I had been reading exclusively, with more attention to headings and titles and the ability to reread and create more context inside the book, I might have felt differently. Is it fair to base my rating on my engagement with the book? Probably not, but it's all I have to go on.
A fascinating, if not entirely convincing, read.
A bit from his Author's Note that opens the book:
We are materially richer than ever before. We have abolished many material ills. And yet we are ontologically queasy. We feel that we're significant creatures, but have no way of describing that significance. Most of us abjure the crass fundamentalisms - both religious and secular - that give us cheap and easy answers to the question 'Why am I alive?' No Upper Palaeolithic hunter, looking up at the sky, would demean the gods by thinking that they could be constrained within the terse formulae of conservative Protestantism.And a sample from the content, part of his reflection in response to joining some friends for an autumn equinox celebration:
We are laughably maladapted to our current lives. We eat in a single breakfast the sugar that an Upper Palaeolithic man might eat in a year, and wonder why we're diabetic, why our coronary arteries sludge up and why we're tense with unexpended energy. We walk in a year what an Upper Palaeolithic hunter would walk in a day, and wonder why our bodies are like putty. We devote to TV brains designed for constant alertness against wolves, and wonder why there's a nagging sense of dissatisfaction. We agree to be led by self-serving sociopaths who wouldn't survive a day in the forest, and wonder why our societies are wretched and our self-esteem low. We, who work best in families and communities of up to 150, elect to live in vast conglomerations, and wonder why we feel alienated. We have guts built for organic berries, organic elk and organic mushrooms, and we wonder why those guts rebel at organophosphates and herbicides. We're homeotherms, and wonder why our whole metabolism goes haywire when we delegate our thermoregulation to buildings. We're wild creatures, designed for constant ecstatic contact with earth, heaven, trees and gods, and wonder why lives built on the premise that we are mere machines, and spent in centrally heated, electronically lit greenhouses, seem sub-optimal. We have brains shaped and expanded, very expensively, for relationality, and wonder why we're unhappy in an economic structure built on the assumption that we're walled islands who do not and should not bleed into one another. We are people who need stories as we need air, and whose only available story is the dreary, demeaning dialectic of the free market.
-----
I don't explore here what is to be done. I am no seer, sage, shrink or sociologist. But it will involve radical kindness, waking up, and old stories. All humans are Scheherazades: we die each morning if we don't have a good story to tell, and the good ones are all old.
In the hunter-gatherer world the dark inched in; no day was much shorter or longer than its neighbours; each season gave enough, in many different ways, and it was the daily enough that was daily celebrated, not the filling of barns.
In the modern West we have barn-filling celebrations: harvest festivals. We love them. It's good for us to be grateful, even if we can't coherently say to whom the gratitude is due. Harvest festivals seem appropriate. I wonder.
'We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land,' sing the children at squirrelling time. (Well, no they didn't, but let's let that point go.) The hymn is rather self congratulatory. We made the right agricultural choices, we put in the graft and so we're going to have a full belly this winter, and a great knees-up in the village hall next week.
There's a show of humility in the next line: 'But it is fed and watered,' we inform God, 'By thine almighty hand'. It doesn't wash. God is simply a partner in the project that we have conceived and, in the traditional economy, he and his priests might be entitled to a small cut - say 10 per cent, the tithe - for his pains. We're to be clapped on the back, too, for backing the right God, and for having appeased him in a way that's evidently worked. It's very Neolithic, and very un-Palaeolithic. Upper Palaeolithic thanks are constant, trembling and directed towards the animal or plant that's given itself up. And they can't, unlike Neolithic thanks, be redirected sycophantically to the earthly ruler who is God's deputy, who has directed that the seed be sown, on whose beneficence you depend and who is sitting in the padded pew in his best suit, ready to receive with an avuncular smile the grateful tugging of your forelock as you file out of church.
January 31, 2023
***(*)
"Totally bonkers" noemde de boekencriticus van The Guardian de auteur van dit boek, en eerlijk gezegd heb ik dat ook meer dan eens gedacht.
Dit boek is opgedeeld in 3 delen. In het eerste en langste deel, verplaatst de auteur zich naar de wereld van het Laat-Paleolithicum en wordt gedurende verschillende, korte periodes samen met zijn 12-jarige zoon een Jager-Verzamelaar.
Daarna verkent hij de verschillende levenswijzen van het Neolithicum wanneer de mens de overstap maakt naar het leven als landbouwer.
Het laatste, kortste, deel gaat over de verlichting waarin alles gerationaliseerd wordt en de vervreemding van de natura (fauna en flora) totaal wordt.
Totally bonkers inderdaad om zo extreem te gaan leven, maar voor de rest heb ik wel veel geleerd of bevestigd gezien. Bvb hoe bij de Jager-Verzamelaar het respect voor de wereld ervoor zorgde dat alles van een gedood dier werd gebruikt. Of hoe er voeling was met de ziel van de dingen rondom. Het gaat vaak over de ziel der dingen en het contact met de doden in dat eerste deel.
Het gaat ook over het ontstaan van taal en van daaruit het symbolisme, over de kracht van muziek en dans.
Wat me ook deed nadenken was de bemerking dat we ons eten vaak niet meer herkennen. Wat hebben die netjes verpakte ham of sneetjes kip in de supermarkt nog te maken met het dier van wie het afkomstig is. Dit is een goede bewustwordingsoefening.
En dus, ondanks het soms, ach zeg maar gerust vaak, extreme gedrag van de auteur, is dit een zeer waardevol boek, één dat verwijst naar méér zintuigen dan die we nu kennen en gebruiken.
"Totally bonkers" noemde de boekencriticus van The Guardian de auteur van dit boek, en eerlijk gezegd heb ik dat ook meer dan eens gedacht.
Dit boek is opgedeeld in 3 delen. In het eerste en langste deel, verplaatst de auteur zich naar de wereld van het Laat-Paleolithicum en wordt gedurende verschillende, korte periodes samen met zijn 12-jarige zoon een Jager-Verzamelaar.
Daarna verkent hij de verschillende levenswijzen van het Neolithicum wanneer de mens de overstap maakt naar het leven als landbouwer.
Het laatste, kortste, deel gaat over de verlichting waarin alles gerationaliseerd wordt en de vervreemding van de natura (fauna en flora) totaal wordt.
Totally bonkers inderdaad om zo extreem te gaan leven, maar voor de rest heb ik wel veel geleerd of bevestigd gezien. Bvb hoe bij de Jager-Verzamelaar het respect voor de wereld ervoor zorgde dat alles van een gedood dier werd gebruikt. Of hoe er voeling was met de ziel van de dingen rondom. Het gaat vaak over de ziel der dingen en het contact met de doden in dat eerste deel.
Het gaat ook over het ontstaan van taal en van daaruit het symbolisme, over de kracht van muziek en dans.
Wat me ook deed nadenken was de bemerking dat we ons eten vaak niet meer herkennen. Wat hebben die netjes verpakte ham of sneetjes kip in de supermarkt nog te maken met het dier van wie het afkomstig is. Dit is een goede bewustwordingsoefening.
En dus, ondanks het soms, ach zeg maar gerust vaak, extreme gedrag van de auteur, is dit een zeer waardevol boek, één dat verwijst naar méér zintuigen dan die we nu kennen en gebruiken.
March 14, 2022
I received an advance reader's copy through Goodreads First Reads, and I am grateful for this opportunity.
This is an evocative and compelling dive into mankind's relationship with nature and ourselves, but one should go into reading it with the understanding that it favors a more informal treatment of the subject rather than full historical and scientific accuracy. Admittedly, this is not really an area of topic where you can rely on exact sources to justify your reasoning, and the fluid nature of the narrative can be engaging. However, much of the narrative cannot be fully substantiated by precise facts. There is no bibliography, merely references and suggested readings - to quote Foster, "An adequate bibliography would be a list of everything ever written by or about humans." I do think Foster does have a well-rounded understanding of the subjects he is addressing, but a good share of the material, such as his assertion that autumn is a negative season of decay and doesn't deserve praise, are simply his own opinion.
Still, the book is compelling in its arguments and forces us to address uncomfortable aspects of civilization and what we have lost in the stages of our advancement from the paleolithic age. I don't necessarily agree with everything in the book, but it does give me a lot of food for thought, and I certainly will be thinking hard about some of the touchy subjects he brought up in the course of the book, and what it means for me as a human.
While this is a very enjoyable book, it does have a few issues I want to bring up. First is the stream of consciousness sense of the book. Sometimes, there are straightforward arguments set out, and at other times it seems like we're just jumping from one thing to the next. This can sometimes be a little confusing.
A related issue stemming in part from the rambling nature of the book is that there isn't really a satisfactory conclusion to the narrative. The final section of the book - covering the Enlightenment - is much shorter than the other portions, being only 35 pages (the Paleolithic was over 200 pages, and the Neolithic was almost 100 pages). The short length of the final section makes me feel that the last section was rushed, and we never really get an answer to the question "What should we do now, then?" Similarly, while the first two sections concluded with an ongoing parable about a man and woman, when asked for a story at the end of the final chapter, Foster just says "It is time to tell it yourself." While I can understand the message he's trying to get across in that omission, it does contribute to a sense of empty uncertainty at the end of the book, leaving us unsure what we should do with our new understanding.
However, there is somewhat of a conclusion to be found in the book - however, it's at the very front. The author's note at the beginning is the closest thing the book has to a solid conclusion - one that consolidates and highlights Foster's overall arguments from the narrative. I'd sort of advise saving the author's note for last to end your reading on a more satisfying note.
Overall, while the stream of consciousness set-up of the book can be disconcerting and hinders some of its arguments, it nevertheless makes profound statements about how we as humans have changed - physically, mentally, and in our connection to nature. I do not regret reading this book, and it continues to make me question my previous understanding of my existence on the planet.
This is an evocative and compelling dive into mankind's relationship with nature and ourselves, but one should go into reading it with the understanding that it favors a more informal treatment of the subject rather than full historical and scientific accuracy. Admittedly, this is not really an area of topic where you can rely on exact sources to justify your reasoning, and the fluid nature of the narrative can be engaging. However, much of the narrative cannot be fully substantiated by precise facts. There is no bibliography, merely references and suggested readings - to quote Foster, "An adequate bibliography would be a list of everything ever written by or about humans." I do think Foster does have a well-rounded understanding of the subjects he is addressing, but a good share of the material, such as his assertion that autumn is a negative season of decay and doesn't deserve praise, are simply his own opinion.
Still, the book is compelling in its arguments and forces us to address uncomfortable aspects of civilization and what we have lost in the stages of our advancement from the paleolithic age. I don't necessarily agree with everything in the book, but it does give me a lot of food for thought, and I certainly will be thinking hard about some of the touchy subjects he brought up in the course of the book, and what it means for me as a human.
While this is a very enjoyable book, it does have a few issues I want to bring up. First is the stream of consciousness sense of the book. Sometimes, there are straightforward arguments set out, and at other times it seems like we're just jumping from one thing to the next. This can sometimes be a little confusing.
A related issue stemming in part from the rambling nature of the book is that there isn't really a satisfactory conclusion to the narrative. The final section of the book - covering the Enlightenment - is much shorter than the other portions, being only 35 pages (the Paleolithic was over 200 pages, and the Neolithic was almost 100 pages). The short length of the final section makes me feel that the last section was rushed, and we never really get an answer to the question "What should we do now, then?" Similarly, while the first two sections concluded with an ongoing parable about a man and woman, when asked for a story at the end of the final chapter, Foster just says "It is time to tell it yourself." While I can understand the message he's trying to get across in that omission, it does contribute to a sense of empty uncertainty at the end of the book, leaving us unsure what we should do with our new understanding.
However, there is somewhat of a conclusion to be found in the book - however, it's at the very front. The author's note at the beginning is the closest thing the book has to a solid conclusion - one that consolidates and highlights Foster's overall arguments from the narrative. I'd sort of advise saving the author's note for last to end your reading on a more satisfying note.
Overall, while the stream of consciousness set-up of the book can be disconcerting and hinders some of its arguments, it nevertheless makes profound statements about how we as humans have changed - physically, mentally, and in our connection to nature. I do not regret reading this book, and it continues to make me question my previous understanding of my existence on the planet.
November 15, 2021
My first recommendation with this book is that if you are more inclined toward suspicion, skepticism, and general materialism, then I would tell you to read the "Enlightenment" section first—which comes at the end of the book but won't spoil anything for you. It discusses the various problems we come across with a much more critical eye than the rest of the text. From that firmer footing, delve into the rest.
The "upper Paleolithic" section was too reliant on feeling rather than fact. I wished Foster had more academic sources to show us and elucidate upon rather than tell us about his time in the woods with his son. As interesting as those moments may be, and as helpful they could be to helping him form an idea about prehistoric man, I didn't pick up the book to read Creative Nonfiction. By the time we move into the "Neolithic" we're on firmer ground, with more research available to reflect on.
Categorically speaking, if I were to draw a spectrum between dry or dense academic texts that are unavailable to the average reader and books like BECOMING ANIMAL by David Abram this would go somewhere in the middle but slightly leaning more toward Abram's work, though its not a fair comparison. I hoped it would have gone the other way, and felt it got closer to that during the "Enlightenment" period, but never made the leap for me.
Personally, it squeaked into 4 stars, but I'd feel more comfortable with a 3.5, because it left me wanting more.
The "upper Paleolithic" section was too reliant on feeling rather than fact. I wished Foster had more academic sources to show us and elucidate upon rather than tell us about his time in the woods with his son. As interesting as those moments may be, and as helpful they could be to helping him form an idea about prehistoric man, I didn't pick up the book to read Creative Nonfiction. By the time we move into the "Neolithic" we're on firmer ground, with more research available to reflect on.
Categorically speaking, if I were to draw a spectrum between dry or dense academic texts that are unavailable to the average reader and books like BECOMING ANIMAL by David Abram this would go somewhere in the middle but slightly leaning more toward Abram's work, though its not a fair comparison. I hoped it would have gone the other way, and felt it got closer to that during the "Enlightenment" period, but never made the leap for me.
Personally, it squeaked into 4 stars, but I'd feel more comfortable with a 3.5, because it left me wanting more.
July 10, 2022
Not at all what I expected. Perhaps I should have read some more in depth reviews upfront. I was expecting (hoping?) for a more fact-based exploration of human development from the Paleolithic period onwards so was surprised that it was primarily the author’s rambling stream of consciousness downloads and somewhat insufferable pontificating and romanticizing about how humans used to live.
This should have appealed more to me, honestly. I don’t mind a little bit of mysticism and am open to the idea that science is imperfect (as any human endeavor is). There is much we don’t understand about consciousness, clearly, and some of the author’s experiences while camping / fasting etc were quite interesting. However, his writing style just didn’t work for me - I found myself getting distracted partway through sentences or paragraphs because they were so disjointed, and found it more priggish than poetic.
I almost gave up on this several times and in hindsight wish I hadn’t continued to plow through. I kept hoping it was going somewhere but I felt it went even more off the rails in the second half and the ending felt…pointless? Anti-climactic? I am probably missing something, since obviously many people loved it, but not for me.
This should have appealed more to me, honestly. I don’t mind a little bit of mysticism and am open to the idea that science is imperfect (as any human endeavor is). There is much we don’t understand about consciousness, clearly, and some of the author’s experiences while camping / fasting etc were quite interesting. However, his writing style just didn’t work for me - I found myself getting distracted partway through sentences or paragraphs because they were so disjointed, and found it more priggish than poetic.
I almost gave up on this several times and in hindsight wish I hadn’t continued to plow through. I kept hoping it was going somewhere but I felt it went even more off the rails in the second half and the ending felt…pointless? Anti-climactic? I am probably missing something, since obviously many people loved it, but not for me.
December 3, 2021
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.
Thank you to the author and publisher for a free advanced reader's copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
October 1, 2021
This book is about what it is to be a human and what it was at various points in our evolution. The concept is nice but a lot of it is about his experiences trying to put himself in the experiences of our ancestors at various times on the evolutionary scale. I think this was well written and would be a good book for some people but it was not for me. Sorry. I read the author's note at the beginning and thought I was going to love the book and for me it never lived up to that promise.
I received a free copy from Goodreads but my opinions are my own.
I received a free copy from Goodreads but my opinions are my own.
June 10, 2022
Really a wonderful book. This was what I imagined Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance would be but so absolutely wasn't - a truly impassioned, sometimes blisteringly insightful, always interesting, occasionally angry, often poetic, orgy of beingness. Where Zen is plodding and shrill and alienating, Being a Human is lithe and teasing and resonant.
Knowledgeable, courageous, ludic (if not lunatic), compelling, and with a beautiful turn of phrase. I put this amongst the ranks of my fifty Top Ten books.
Thank you, very much, Mr Foster.
Knowledgeable, courageous, ludic (if not lunatic), compelling, and with a beautiful turn of phrase. I put this amongst the ranks of my fifty Top Ten books.
Thank you, very much, Mr Foster.
May 25, 2021
This is an incredibly special book. Beautifully descriptive nature writing exploring the origins of consciousness via three periods in our evolution. Part memoir, philosophy and anthropology, this is ideal for anybody that enjoyed ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and ‘The Songlines’. A wonderful piece of writing that will leave you exhilarated and excited for the where the next 40,000 years will take us.
November 5, 2022
Foster probeerde zich in te leven in het leven van onze prehistorische voorouders. Hoe was het om te leven in het laatpaleolithicum en het neolithicum? Hoe beleefden onze voorgangers de wereld?
Deze vraag laat zich enkel beantwoorden door de wereld te beleven met al je zintuigen. Hoe de vroege mens was, zullen we wellicht nooit weten. Dit boek is wel een uitnodiging om buiten te komen.
Ironisch is wel dat het resultaat van Fosters belevenissen een boek is. Een product van de verlichte wereld waartegen hij zich, al dan niet gemeend, zo tegen afzet.
Deze vraag laat zich enkel beantwoorden door de wereld te beleven met al je zintuigen. Hoe de vroege mens was, zullen we wellicht nooit weten. Dit boek is wel een uitnodiging om buiten te komen.
Ironisch is wel dat het resultaat van Fosters belevenissen een boek is. Een product van de verlichte wereld waartegen hij zich, al dan niet gemeend, zo tegen afzet.
September 27, 2021
“We are people who needs stories, as we need air…”
Being Human by Charles Foster was an interesting read. The book is philosophical and poetic. It discusses mankind’s relationship with mother nature as we journey through history without specific dates. Exploring the consciousness via three periods of our evolution, Paleolithic, Neolithic and Enlightenment. It also includes subjects about the origins of religion and language.
Full Review over at https://mybookcafelife.com
**I received this book in exchange for an honest review**
Being Human by Charles Foster was an interesting read. The book is philosophical and poetic. It discusses mankind’s relationship with mother nature as we journey through history without specific dates. Exploring the consciousness via three periods of our evolution, Paleolithic, Neolithic and Enlightenment. It also includes subjects about the origins of religion and language.
Full Review over at https://mybookcafelife.com
**I received this book in exchange for an honest review**
January 17, 2022
Being a Human charts three periods in human development. I found it a decidedly mixed bag: what starts off strong as a gonzo road trip into the birth of consciousness devolves into an incoherent diatribe. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2022...
May 9, 2022
Review pending. I just finished - as much as one can 'finish' any book - and am still soaking in the prose and my irritation at Goodreads reductive 1-5 star rating system.
August 2, 2022
“(Richard) Dawkins es una vergüenza”, dice un Charles Foster que se cree que ponerse una mochila, una ropa de Coronel Tapioca, un mechero, una lona de plástico para no pasar frío y una réplica de una herramienta de sílex le sirve para sentirse como uno de nuestros ancestros del paleolítico. No hay nada más ridículo que leerle cuando está a escasos metros de una carretera, con sus visiones de un padre y un hijo místico-prehistóricos que comparten con él sus inquietudes, y escondiéndose detrás de los árboles cuando aparece un turista en esa naturaleza supuestamente salvaje.
Eso sí, se cree que está cerca de los paleolíticos porque mata mucho, o al menos habla mucho de matar animales, y porque dice que tiene unos amigos muy neolíticos que fertilizan las espinacas con sangre menstrual para que tengan más hierro.
“Para oír hablar a los hombres de las cavernas, solo hay que ir a España y sentarse en un bar con los ojos cerrados y la imaginación desbocada”, dice un Charles Foster que hace un paseo ridículo por los idiomas, las culturas y las civilizaciones, mientras se cree que tiene mucho contacto con la naturaleza porque se pasa días en el campo sin ducharse, se mete en una cueva o se hace una mariscada con una olla comprada en cualquier chino.
Si Charles Foster intenta darle un cierto aire científico (aunque lamentable) en el arranque de su libro, poco a poco va derivando hacia el animismo (probablemente la religión más deleznable, si es que hay escalas en las religiones) y hacia una creencia absurda en la telepatía y, por supuesto, en una interpretación torticera de lo que es el universo cuántico, para decir que todos estamos conectados.
El resumen de este libro metodológica y científicamente absurdo es sencillo: “(Charles) Foster es una vergüenza” y desde luego no debería dar clase en una universidad como Oxford.
Eso sí, se cree que está cerca de los paleolíticos porque mata mucho, o al menos habla mucho de matar animales, y porque dice que tiene unos amigos muy neolíticos que fertilizan las espinacas con sangre menstrual para que tengan más hierro.
“Para oír hablar a los hombres de las cavernas, solo hay que ir a España y sentarse en un bar con los ojos cerrados y la imaginación desbocada”, dice un Charles Foster que hace un paseo ridículo por los idiomas, las culturas y las civilizaciones, mientras se cree que tiene mucho contacto con la naturaleza porque se pasa días en el campo sin ducharse, se mete en una cueva o se hace una mariscada con una olla comprada en cualquier chino.
Si Charles Foster intenta darle un cierto aire científico (aunque lamentable) en el arranque de su libro, poco a poco va derivando hacia el animismo (probablemente la religión más deleznable, si es que hay escalas en las religiones) y hacia una creencia absurda en la telepatía y, por supuesto, en una interpretación torticera de lo que es el universo cuántico, para decir que todos estamos conectados.
El resumen de este libro metodológica y científicamente absurdo es sencillo: “(Charles) Foster es una vergüenza” y desde luego no debería dar clase en una universidad como Oxford.
November 10, 2021
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.
Full review here
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
September 29, 2022
Foster's radically experiential and immersive methods of investigation into the minds of Paleolithic and Neolithic humans become the foundation of an argument for ecstatic mysticism.
If we go into the woods and the rivers and the hills and the seas with all this, the wild will feel appreciated. It will know we're trying, and will start to come out and introduce itself. And since you are part of the wild, you should brace yourself for an encounter with yourself." p. 328
If we go into the woods and the rivers and the hills and the seas with all this, the wild will feel appreciated. It will know we're trying, and will start to come out and introduce itself. And since you are part of the wild, you should brace yourself for an encounter with yourself." p. 328
November 25, 2023
My thanks to both Goodreads and the publisher Henry Holt & Company for an advanced copy of this book about one man's attempt to understand the life of those who came far before us, and the physical and mental toils he put himself through.
One of the biggest problems with understanding the past is the inability for the people who live in the present to even grasp what life was life for those in the past. How can we who have never been without the sound of machinery, cars, truck, planes, mowers blowers, even the dull home of refrigerators, the white noise of fans, the pulsing of cell phones, understand a life of little ambient noise. Sure nature, their own breathing, talking while fashioning tools, but nothing else. No pings, no dings. A time when the only light people knew was fire, sun and star. I remember reading once by an author discussing that moving someone through science from the past to now, these people after a some shock, vaccines and health care would probably be ok. A little behind, but they could adapt. Move a present day human to the past, and no matter how many reality shows a person has watched, they would probably be dead in a week. Disease, starvation, water, all the things that people in war zone find themselves dealing with, and with no respite. Generations can even understand the previous generation, how does one understand people from thousands of years ago. Charles Foster in his book Being a Human gives this a try, and his experiences and not only intriguing but tell a lot about humans, our capability, resourcefulness, and even spirituality.
Charles Foster set off to try three different things. To live as much as possible in three different eras of human existence, the Upper Paleolithic, the Neolithic, and as a person experiencing the Enlightenment. For Upper Paleolithic Foster and his son took to the wilds of England in three different seasons, winter, spring and summer, leaving in crude shelters, foraging for food, and wandering like our ancestors did. Neolithic found Foster and his children living in different areas, on farms and fields that try to keep the early ways of farming and herd gathering, learning to see what the Earth gives, and how being in touch with land forms a character. Enlightenment meant wandering his Oxford, engaging in discussions, ideas, and fighting against perceived notions, and running into as much resistance as any Renaissance thinker did.
A fascinating book that is hard to describe and a book that kept surprising me. Living in the woods, in winter with one's son sounds like fun, until one reads the things that happened, from food problems, keeping weight, and the woods in many ways turning on Foster, but teaching much to his son. There are discussions on diet, hunting, the ethics of killing, and shamanism. The other sections are not as harrowing, but still interesting with lots of discussion on herding, growing, living with animals, and living with nature. There is so much information in this book, so much to ruminate on, and much to discuss. Foster is an incredible writer, with no fear about sharing his experiences no matter what happens. Or how odd he looks, which is pointed out by a Professor character. A book about the world, about humans, and about being a human that I really hated to see end.
Recommended for readers of who enjoy nature books, survival books, books that make one question, and for people who love a book that just covers so much information. A real classic, and I can't wait to read more by Charles Foster.
One of the biggest problems with understanding the past is the inability for the people who live in the present to even grasp what life was life for those in the past. How can we who have never been without the sound of machinery, cars, truck, planes, mowers blowers, even the dull home of refrigerators, the white noise of fans, the pulsing of cell phones, understand a life of little ambient noise. Sure nature, their own breathing, talking while fashioning tools, but nothing else. No pings, no dings. A time when the only light people knew was fire, sun and star. I remember reading once by an author discussing that moving someone through science from the past to now, these people after a some shock, vaccines and health care would probably be ok. A little behind, but they could adapt. Move a present day human to the past, and no matter how many reality shows a person has watched, they would probably be dead in a week. Disease, starvation, water, all the things that people in war zone find themselves dealing with, and with no respite. Generations can even understand the previous generation, how does one understand people from thousands of years ago. Charles Foster in his book Being a Human gives this a try, and his experiences and not only intriguing but tell a lot about humans, our capability, resourcefulness, and even spirituality.
Charles Foster set off to try three different things. To live as much as possible in three different eras of human existence, the Upper Paleolithic, the Neolithic, and as a person experiencing the Enlightenment. For Upper Paleolithic Foster and his son took to the wilds of England in three different seasons, winter, spring and summer, leaving in crude shelters, foraging for food, and wandering like our ancestors did. Neolithic found Foster and his children living in different areas, on farms and fields that try to keep the early ways of farming and herd gathering, learning to see what the Earth gives, and how being in touch with land forms a character. Enlightenment meant wandering his Oxford, engaging in discussions, ideas, and fighting against perceived notions, and running into as much resistance as any Renaissance thinker did.
A fascinating book that is hard to describe and a book that kept surprising me. Living in the woods, in winter with one's son sounds like fun, until one reads the things that happened, from food problems, keeping weight, and the woods in many ways turning on Foster, but teaching much to his son. There are discussions on diet, hunting, the ethics of killing, and shamanism. The other sections are not as harrowing, but still interesting with lots of discussion on herding, growing, living with animals, and living with nature. There is so much information in this book, so much to ruminate on, and much to discuss. Foster is an incredible writer, with no fear about sharing his experiences no matter what happens. Or how odd he looks, which is pointed out by a Professor character. A book about the world, about humans, and about being a human that I really hated to see end.
Recommended for readers of who enjoy nature books, survival books, books that make one question, and for people who love a book that just covers so much information. A real classic, and I can't wait to read more by Charles Foster.
June 18, 2023
Just as he wondered whether we could truly be, inhabit, and appreciate – in all their wonder and uncanniness – our beastly neighbours – badgers, otters, swifts and deer – in Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide, now Charles Foster undertakes an exploration of forms of sentience and being of our paleolithic and neolithic forebears. To ask what we have gained and what we have lost in shifting from a world in which every creature, including things we might now view merely as features of the landscape had souls, into a world in which we are all merely mechanisms within the machine.
Adventures in forty thousand years of consciousness is the subtitle, but it is fair to say that Foster presents this less as adventure and more as tragic fall or narrative of decline. The ensouled world of the paleolithic humans in Foster's account is more richly felt, more honest, more connected with all other creatures, than the increasingly enclosed and disenchanted forms of life that emerge with the shift from hunter-gathering to sedentary agriculture and city-building, and then to to reductionist materialism of the Enlightenment.
Foster writes in visceral, evocative and occasionally elliptic prose in a narrative which bounces vertiginously between discussion of leading-edge anthropological and neuro-scientific research, shamanistic fever dream, cosmological reflection, and more prosaic, if hard-scrabble, travel diary as Foster and his son Tom again traverse English landscapes of varying degrees of harshness seeking to commune with and inhabit the minds of people long gone.
Occasionally verging on being over-written, it is never dull. And Foster's insights and dogmas are delivered with provocative verve or via the oblique authority of animal messengers or the strange presence of a paleolithic hunter, X, and his son who appear and disappear from Foster's narrative entirely, it seems, according to their own rhythms.
I loved it.
You should join Foster in the blue and white shining where cold crawls from the earth in a wood on top of the world. To begin a journey of working out for yourself what it is to be a human.
Adventures in forty thousand years of consciousness is the subtitle, but it is fair to say that Foster presents this less as adventure and more as tragic fall or narrative of decline. The ensouled world of the paleolithic humans in Foster's account is more richly felt, more honest, more connected with all other creatures, than the increasingly enclosed and disenchanted forms of life that emerge with the shift from hunter-gathering to sedentary agriculture and city-building, and then to to reductionist materialism of the Enlightenment.
Codification and constriction strangle the mind... In the Neolithic we started to get boring and miserable.
Foster writes in visceral, evocative and occasionally elliptic prose in a narrative which bounces vertiginously between discussion of leading-edge anthropological and neuro-scientific research, shamanistic fever dream, cosmological reflection, and more prosaic, if hard-scrabble, travel diary as Foster and his son Tom again traverse English landscapes of varying degrees of harshness seeking to commune with and inhabit the minds of people long gone.
Occasionally verging on being over-written, it is never dull. And Foster's insights and dogmas are delivered with provocative verve or via the oblique authority of animal messengers or the strange presence of a paleolithic hunter, X, and his son who appear and disappear from Foster's narrative entirely, it seems, according to their own rhythms.
We're wild creatures, designed for constant ecstatic contact with earth, heaven, trees and gods.
I loved it.
You should join Foster in the blue and white shining where cold crawls from the earth in a wood on top of the world. To begin a journey of working out for yourself what it is to be a human.
October 2, 2021
Charles Foster's Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read, and this is due in no small measure to the mosaic capacities of Foster's mind, and his immersive and deeply expressive prose, which dances along the line of poetry and the pure stream of consciousness while never losing the threads of information, history, and insight that Foster weaves as he writes. Being a Human is a deeply existential work, yet it is very much rooted in the body and the body of humanity across the course of our existence. Foster's explorations into the connections between humans and our environment, and how that relationship has degraded as we have become more settled, are nothing short of revelatory. His immersive experiments into earlier ways of living allow the reader entry and access to the tangibility of early ways of living. I can't think of a nature writer, outside of the superb Philip Hoare, who I look forward to hearing from more that Charles Foster. As an author, a literary stylist, and an intellect, he is sui generis. This is a book that should be read by anyone who ever wondered where we came from as humans, and who ever silently dreaded where we may be headed next.
December 10, 2021
I was mailed this book, maybe bc i wrote on GRs how i absolutely loved Foster's other book, Being a Beast, where he was both an otter and a badger and 2 or 3 others, altho i mis-remember him being a beaver.
In this book, he's sort of doing the same thing with people, by having to go back eons in time, which he did, sometimes with his son, who didn't always enjoy the journey. I tho't the hunter-gatherer section was the most amazing and how for survival, he became aware of senses he didn/t remember ever using.
I read it in a choppy, skip-around fashion bc i listened in bed and kept falling asleep. Some sections contained too much philosophizing for me at the time and other sections i loved!
He didn't mention, but it seems his medical training and meds might have saved him at times. Some of the time, he had to try to forget that he was in familiar areas, near his home in modern-day England. As in the Beast book, i'm amazed how his wife put up with his fanatism; i really hope his devotion and his books have made a lot of money for the family.
Audio overdrive @ normal speed (as had to concentrate in some parts). I do plan to go back and read sections of the actual book.
In this book, he's sort of doing the same thing with people, by having to go back eons in time, which he did, sometimes with his son, who didn't always enjoy the journey. I tho't the hunter-gatherer section was the most amazing and how for survival, he became aware of senses he didn/t remember ever using.
I read it in a choppy, skip-around fashion bc i listened in bed and kept falling asleep. Some sections contained too much philosophizing for me at the time and other sections i loved!
He didn't mention, but it seems his medical training and meds might have saved him at times. Some of the time, he had to try to forget that he was in familiar areas, near his home in modern-day England. As in the Beast book, i'm amazed how his wife put up with his fanatism; i really hope his devotion and his books have made a lot of money for the family.
Audio overdrive @ normal speed (as had to concentrate in some parts). I do plan to go back and read sections of the actual book.
July 20, 2022
This book said that it would go on a journey and it did do just that. I had very little knowledge of the last 40,000 years and I was fearful of it being told to me in a full and forgettable manner. This was not the case. I felt engaged and interested the entire time that I was reading, and I found his methods of immersion supremely fascinating. There was a particular lilt to his writing style that felt endlessly hopeful yet straightforward and wondering which appealed to me greatly. I feel that I have learnt more about what it means, and has meant, to be human but I have learnt to that it is a journey that does not end even in death. I found his insights on how we live, how we treat animals, how we look after our dead and how we address the earth around us compared to the hunter-gatherers of the Upper Palaeolithic and the Neolithic vital to my understanding of living and I will treasure this information for a long time. My consciousness has certainly expanded and my head is now full of unanswerable important questions.
February 22, 2024
This book might have been beyond my intellectual capacity as I had to read a few sections a couple times because I was not getting it. Our author and his son decide to immerse themselves in the Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic eras by living like early humans in the rural woods and then a primitive settlement respectively. He works hard to blend psychology, nature, history, and ethics to feel connected to our ancestors. It is interesting to hear their thoughts as they scavenge for roadkill and the challenges they face while trying to survive. He did a great job writing about nature and describing the senses allowing readers to feel as if they are transported to the forrest as well. He also shares previously popular worldviews (some of which are still held by other cultures today) such as the idea that every living thing as a soul and to treat things with kindness. He pulls experts in to provide more depth for certain areas. We also have a reoccurring (probably imaginary?) character, X, who is described as a true Paleo man, which was an interesting twist.
September 21, 2021
I almost put this one down after a few pages -too subjective; too much potential for make believe- but Foster's very real, primal contact with inner and outer landscapes drew me in. His writing is deep speculation about experiences about which we can only speculate. It's dark, gritty, dangerous, and poetic. I appreciate the contrasts Foster makes between Paleolithic and Neolithic religion and attitudes towards nature (I feel roots of connection to what Foster describes for both these periods: As an agriculturalist per the Neolithic, I feel deep paleo gratitude toward the plants that return the favor of being planted by feeding me). In the final section, Foster gives short treatment to the Enlightenment, mixing it up with the Renaissance in places. This was a bit disappointing because, given Foster's insights into the development of prehistoric human thought, I would love to read what he has to say about these later periods, but that is not what he set out to do in this book.
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