Our species has been on Earth for little more than 200,000 years, just a fraction of the history of life - and yet in that short period, we have gone from a group of simple foragers to a planet-dominating force, capable of everything from art to atom bombs. In Transcendence, Gaia Vince shows how it happened. Although prevailing theory holds that a recent cognitive revolution transformed humans, VInce argues that we are the product of a unique coevolution of our genes, environment, and culture. Beginning hundreds of thousands of years ago, with four key drivers - fire, language, beauty, and time - it set our species on a new path, unleashing a compounding process that propelled us from the Stone Age to the Sapce AGe and continues to transform us today. Provocative and poetic, Transcendence shows how our species slipped the bonds of biological life to determine the course of its own destiny. And it asks: Now that we have remade our world, what are we doing to ourselves? --