Charles Foster, "Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness" (Metropolitan Books, 2021)

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Dec 29, 2024

Charles Foster, a legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist, explores the evolution of human consciousness over 40,000 years, drawing on his experiences living as different species. He reflects on pivotal moments like the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture, revealing how this shift has impacted our mental health and relationships. Foster emphasizes the need for a deeper connection to nature and revisiting ancient narratives to address modern identity crises, advocating for a blend of science, intuition, and empathy in navigating our complex existence.

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ANECDOTE

Hunter-Gatherer Skills

Upper Paleolithic humans were skilled naturalists, intimately connected to their environment.
Unlike farmers, they relied on knowledge of diverse species and seasonal changes.

INSIGHT

Developments in Human Consciousness

Notable developments include representative art, cave paintings, and the understanding of life after death.
Shamanic practices and rituals emerged, acknowledging agency in the world.

INSIGHT

Leisure and Imagination

Hunter-gatherers had ample leisure time, fostering imagination and storytelling.
This era produced rich creation myths, unlike the simplified, economically driven narratives of today.

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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: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness (Metropolitan Books, 2021) 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.

Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch.

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