Collaborators through Time

How Humans Partnered with Nature, Technology, and Each Other

R. Alexander Bentley, Michael J. O'Brien

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798765160244
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Social Sciences

Spanning 2 million years, this book examines how humans partnered with nature, technology, and each other to shape their world, from evolutionary origins and ancient innovations to the rise of artificial intelligence.

This book examines how humans collaborated with other entities, expanding in scale from individuals to other species of Homo, and further to the formation of groups, interactions with organisms, connections with past generations, and the transformative role of technology. Through dozens of vivid examples –from the lives of Neanderthals to the origins of agriculture, the impact of ancient diseases, the practices of shamans, Bronze Age innovations, global trade routes, and the products of the world's first cities – this narrative illuminates the intricate web of partnerships that defined human history. The final chapter delves into artificial intelligence, illustrating how its evolution mirrors the co-evolution of humans with technologies.

AI's rapid development of learning and collaborative abilities echoes humanity's own adaptive journey, albeit at an accelerated pace. Richly illustrated with over 50 full-color figures, this book offers a visually engaging and intellectually stimulating journey through the partnerships that have shaped our world, from the dawn of prehistory to the cutting edge of AI.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Teams, Experts, and Multiple Parts
• We’re Still Evolving
• Like Us in So Many Ways—Except for the Most Important One
• The Party Starts
• Interspecies Interactions
• The Social Brain
• A New, Improved Protein That Changed Everything
• Inside the Social Brain
• Other Brains
• Milking It
• Multiple Defenses
• Swept through the City Like a Virus
• Shamanic Traditions
• Traditions as Inheritance
• Cultural Attractors
• Tempo, Mode, and Future Technological Evolution
• Deep Cultural Legacies of Farming
• Inherited Kinship and Farming
• Deep Cultural Ancestry
• Early Trade Networks
• The Era of Cities
• Empires as Networks
• The Dilution of Expertise
• Preserving Expertise
• Individual Learning: AI like Early Hominins
• Social Learning: AI More like Us
• Alien Intelligence
• AI Traditions
• AI and Cultural Evolution
• AI Needs a Map
• AI as a Collaborator, Not a Conqueror
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Figure Credits
• Index
• About the Authors