The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional

What is this book about?

The topic of this book is creativity. Since our earliest ancestors, we have used creativity and collaboration to solve challenges. This book explains the origins of our creativity and how it has developed through the years. Fuentes uses the ideals of creativity, imagination, collaboration and communication to tell our evolutionary tale.

Genre

This book is non-fiction, but is also presents many hypotheses that have not been proven. Fuentes asserts his own opinions on certain issues, while providing evidence for both sides of an argument. This book is written as a chronological story, beginning 7 million years ago at the split of chimpanzees and hominins.

Main Argument

Fuentes argues that collaborative creativity is the driving force of human evolution and it is what allowed us to survive amidst the downfall of every other Homo species. Humans are unique due to our large brains and complex cognitive abilities, which why we have such a great creative capacity. We have shaped the world around us through our responses to problem and conflict, and we have used cooperation and creativity to do so.