The Creative Spark Audiobook By Agustín Fuentes cover art

The Creative Spark

How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional

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The Creative Spark

By: Agustín Fuentes
Narrated by: Agustín Fuentes
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Buy for $18.00

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A bold new synthesis of paleontology, archaeology, genetics, and anthropology that overturns misconceptions about race, war and peace, and human nature itself, answering an age-old question: What made humans so exceptional among all the species on Earth?

Creativity. It is the secret of what makes humans special, hiding in plain sight. Agustín Fuentes argues that your child's finger painting comes essentially from the same place as creativity in hunting and gathering millions of years ago, and throughout history in making war and peace, in intimate relationships, in shaping the planet, in our communities, and in all of art, religion, and even science. It requires imagination and collaboration. Every poet has her muse; every engineer, an architect; every politician, a constituency. The manner of the collaborations varies widely, but successful collaboration is inseparable from imagination, and it brought us everything from knives and hot meals to iPhones and interstellar spacecraft.

Weaving fascinating stories of our ancient ancestors' creativity, Fuentes finds the patterns that match modern behavior in humans and animals. This key quality has propelled the evolutionary development of our bodies, minds, and cultures, both for good and for bad. It's not the drive to reproduce; nor competition for mates, or resources, or power; nor our propensity for caring for one another that have separated us out from all other creatures.

As Fuentes concludes, to make something lasting and useful today you need to understand the nature of your collaboration with others, what imagination can and can't accomplish, and, finally, just how completely our creativity is responsible for the world we live in. Agustín Fuentes's resounding multimillion-year perspective will inspire readers—and spark all kinds of creativity. Anthropology Thought-Provoking Civilization Natural History Paleontology Social Sciences World Psychology & Mental Health Archaeology Psychology
Thorough Scientific Analysis • Coherent Evolutionary Narrative • Educational Content • Objective Presentation

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Been thinking a lot about the stoned ape theory after listening to this book, wish the author touched on it

Very good

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Nicely describe the how we evolve and makes you more understand why thing are, as they are now from understanding what our ancestors were dealing with and how they were solving a problems

Educative

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I enjoyed the substance of the book, and appreciated some ideas that had not previously been 'front and centre' in my thinking. Specifically, the idea that animals create 'niches' for themselves, modifying the environment in a way that feeds back as selection pressure on future generations, particularly as the human 'niche' expanded to include toolmaking, language, domestication of the food supply, and eventually cities. The narrator was extremely irritating - he often uses a staccato presentation that separates words into separate units, providing (often) unwarranted emphasis. In addition, he tends to commence sentences loudly, and then trail off at the end into a soft, muffled, poorly projected articulation of what is often the crux of the thought, leaving you struggling to understand the point of the sentence or paragraph. I often lost the thread of the story as I took time to realise he had said 'beads' and not 'bees', or 'Balinese' and not 'Bolognese', or 'forager' and not 'forger'. In the end I spent far too much time being irritated, trying to decipher the narrator's performance, and too little time concentrating on the author's thoughts.

Interesting book, irritating performance.

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I’ve enjoyed listening to this book and this author, and I hope to read more in the future. Thank you.

Lovely

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I found this book by sheer accident and have enjoyed it so thoroughly that this will be the first review I ever took the time to write. The author tells an amazingly coherent and interesting story. He lays out the science in a very easy to understand way and gives supporting evidence in abundance. But it doesn’t read like a scientific book. It reads like a wonderful and entertaining history of humanity. Also, this is one of only a few books where the author does an excellent job of narrator. Very engaging.

Wow. Accidental gem

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