The Others: How Animals Made Us Human

A brilliant book. Immensely learned, wide-ranging, daring in style, challenging in conception, Herculean in vocabulary. Shepard's in-your-face style is both urgent and circumspect. Understanding what human beings are must begin with a careful study of this grand book about what animals mean to our species.

This is one of Shepard's most complete, potent and piercing works. The descriptions of "dense" from other reviewers is a lesson in a culture of boredom that sweeps modernity to the core. In a subject that needs to be articulated so well to affectively challenge the entire foundation of domestication/civilization, you best be prepared to read and absorb so the same rudimentary, arrogant ideologies don't keep appearing time after time, even into levels of academia. Chapters like "Hounding Nature: The Nightmares of Domestication" cut straight through the bone on our exclusive love for dogs and horses as "man's best friend". Easily one of the most important philosophers for the future of humanity, who was way "ahead" and "behind" his time.

Paul Shepard's book, The Others: how animals made us human, is a thoughtful analysis of how animals played a role in determining who and what we are as human animals. As in discussions of religion and politics, you will not agree with everything Professor Shepard writes. However, you will agree that he has developed a credible case that you cannot understand people, whether 10,000 years ago or today, without a better understanding of how Homo erectus and Homo sapiens interacted with both food and predatory animals 100,000 or 1,000,000 years ago. It will make you think, and that, not manipulation, is Professor Shepard's goal.

Paul Shepard will probably be viewed as one of the more important philosophers of nature in the future. He more or less created the field of human ecology and his books have had a major influence on the environmental movement. All of his books are worth reading and are recommended. However Shepard is not to be taken lightly. His work is dense, at times difficult, and will shake up your thinking. From his first major work, "Man in the landscape," to the end of his life he threw off ideas like a grinding stone throwing off sparks. If you are really serious about the idea that human evolutionary history is important to our current lives then Paul Shepard is for you. If you are looking for a light read about animals, I'd look elsewhere.

Paul Shepherd was a great thinker, and I regret that I only became aware of his work very recently. His thesis throughout most of his work is that civilization as we know it is the true enemy of human beings. We have insulated ourselves from nature and from our teachers the animals. I do not always agree with his point of view, but he presents his ideas in such a way as to allow you to grasp and test them, and certainly not to shove them down your throat or tell you that this is the absolute truth. He really gets you to think.