"How did humans come to be who we are? In hiw widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animals by living as a badger and other species. Now he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the ocnsciousness 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 lives as a Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer, dwelling in makeshift shelters in the rural woods of England. He tests his five improverished 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, cafés, and art galleries. He finds his world and himself bizarre and disembodied, and he rules the atrophy of our sense, 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 forty thousand 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."--From dust jacket.