num_pages: 352
description: In the tradition of Guns Germs and Steel and Sapiens a winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books shows how four tools have enabled humans to control the destiny of our species.What enabled us to go from simple stone tools to smartphones? How did bands of hunter-gatherers evolve into multinational empires? Readers of Sapiens will say a cognitive revolution  a dramatic evolutionary change that altered our brains turning primitive humans into modern ones  caused a cultural explosion. In Transcendence Gaia Vince argues instead that modern humans are the product of a nuanced coevolution of our genes environment and culture that goes back into deep time. She explains how through four key elements  fire language beauty and time  our species diverged from the evolutionary path of all other animals unleashing a compounding process that launched us into the Space Age and beyond. Provocative and poetic Transcendence shows how a primate took dominion over nature and turned itself into something marvellous.
language: English
title: Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time
publisher: Basic Books