Animate
How Animals Shape the Human Mind
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- 9,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
'An astonishing adventure' – Isabella Tree, author of Wilding
'Thrilling, effortlessly readable' – Charles Foster, author of The Edges of the World
'Impeccably researched' – Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals
A mind-expanding deep dive into how animals have shaped us, from the palaeolithic to the present day.
In Animate, science writer Michael Bond explores how animals have profoundly influenced our minds and cultures. Drawing on cutting-edge insights from psychology, anthropology, literature and neuroscience, Bond traces the varied ways their lives have affected ours, from our hunter-gatherer ancestors whose brains were rewired by the prey they hunted and the predators they feared, to the medieval and Enlightenment thinkers who used animals to promote notions of human supremacy.
Scientists today are challenging the assumption that we are separate from and superior to animals, showing that they too possess intelligence, empathy, creativity and even the ability to use tools. If everything that supposedly makes us human is shared with other creatures, where does that leave us? And if we are not as exceptional as we thought, how should we be treating the animals we live alongside?
A fascinating exploration of what it means to be both human and animal, Animate shows that to better understand ourselves, we must pay more attention to the other beings with whom we share our world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This ambitious if uneven study from science writer Bond (Fans) explores the impact animals have had on humanity. He opens with a visit to France, where he studies Paleolithic cave art, explaining how early humans depicted animals as equals. These images, he argues, reflect a worldview in which humans saw themselves as part of a shared ecological community. Bond contrasts this with later Neolithic imagery, in which human figures appear as hunters and masters of animals. Calling this shift "the great divide," he writes that it marked the moment when humans began to imagine themselves as cognitively and morally superior to other species—a belief that has shaped millennia of human-animal interactions, encouraging humans to eat and mistreat animals without regard for their welfare. In more recent years, Bond explains, scientists have unpacked these attitudes, finding humans "have seriously underestimated the worlds of our fellow creatures, and that our sense of superiority is misplaced." Unfortunately, as the book moves into the modern era, it loses focus; Bond jumps from animal symbolism in dreams to extreme cases of animal hoarding to clinical lycanthropy, a psychological condition in which a person believes and behaves as if they were turned into an animal. The myriad subjects are intriguing, but the connections between them feel tenuous. Readers will be underwhelmed.
