Being a Human: Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness

‘A wonderful, wild, dazzling book. You will feel more human for having read it’ - Literary Review

‘Foster’s daringly imaginative exploration of alternative models of selfhood is an original and beneficial way of grappling with history … precisely what we need to remind us that there are many alternatives to the I, me, mine mindset’ - TLS

What kind of creature is a human? If we don’t know what we are, how can we know how to act? Charles Foster sets out to understand what a human is, inhabiting the sensory worlds of humans at three pivotal moments in our history.

Foster begins his quest with his son in a Derbyshire wood, trying to find a way of experiencing the world that recognises the deep expanse of time when we understood ourselves as hunter-gatherers, and when modern consciousness was first ignited. From there he travels to the Neolithic, a way of being defined by fences, farms, sky gods and slaughterhouses, and finally to the Enlightenment, when we decided that the universe was a machine and we were soulless cogs within it.