Primate change : how the world we made is remaking us / Vybarr Cregan-Reid.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 300-311) and index.

What becomes you? -- Part I. 500,000,000-30,000 BCE : Primates change : movement, mechanics & migrations. Getting up & running ; Stand up. Winding back -- Part II. 30,000 BCE-1700 CE : Seeds, settlements & cities. Planting seeds, processing food & life under cover ; Soil, toil & growth ; Exercise, ergonomics & life & death in the city. Winding back -- Part III. 1700-1910 : Mines, spines, smoke & steam. Developing (bad) work habits ; Early air pollution - or The big choke. Winding back -- Part IV. 1910-present : The sedentary or "digital" revolution. The waist land ; Drowning in air. Winding back -- Part V. The future : Homo sapiens ineptus. Hands & a digital revolution -- Epilogue.

A wide-ranging, polemical look at how and why the human body has changed since humankind first got up on two feet. Spanning the entirety of human history - from primate to transhuman - Vybarr Cregan-Reid's book investigates where we came from, who we are today and how modern technology will change us beyond recognition. In the last two hundred years, humans have made such a tremendous impact on the world that our geological epoch is about to be declared the 'Anthropocene', or the Age of Man. But while we have been busy changing the shape of the world we inhabit, the ways of living that we have been building have, as if under the cover of darkness, been transforming our bodies and altering the expression of our DNA, too.