Animate: How Animals Shape the Human Mind

http://www.renaud-bray.com

http://www.renaud-bray.com

A wide-ranging exploration of how animals have wired our brains and shaped the way we live, from the cave art of the earliest humans to the most cutting-edge of contemporary neuroscience.In Animate, Michael Bond examines how humanity has considered other animals, our relationship with them and its impact on our psychology, from early prehistory to the present day. This relationship began to change when our ancestors took up agriculture, and by the early modern period in the West it had hardened into a posture of dominance.Today, biologists are challenging many of the assumptions that have allowed us to believe that we humans are something special. If animals have sentience, intelligence, culture, creativity, empathy, and the use of tools, as the latest evidence suggests, what does that make us? Science, for a long time an apologist for the human-animal divide, is now forcing us to consider that the differences are less significant than they seem, and that we are creatures at our core.Blending insights from neuroscience, biology, anthropology, literature and history, Bond reaches across an exotic range of subjects: feral children, talking horses, the art of early humans, medieval bestiaries of real, and imagined creatures, dog-headed people and other monsters of the mind, animals who get treated like people, people who believe they are animals, the healing power of pets, the near-universal fascination with wolves, the mythology of shapeshifters, and the dark history of dehumanization.Animate is for anyone interested in the quirks of the mind, the mysteries of the human condition and how we interact with, and are shaped by, the natural world.