Agustín Fuentes is a professor of anthropology at Princeton whose work explores how biology is inseparable from social and cultural life. His research ranges from human evolution and health to race, gender, and multispecies relationships. In The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional, he makes a compelling case that what set humans apart was not brute competition or dominance, but imagination paired with cooperation.

Fuentes argues that our big brains, complex cultures, and technologies emerged because groups learned to solve problems together—experimenting, sharing ideas, and building on one another’s efforts over time. From fire and tool-making to art, religion, and science, human evolution is framed not as passive adaptation but as active, collective world-making.

Rather than seeing evolution as a story driven by violence, he emphasizes hopeful, collaborative creativity. Human ancestors reshaped their environments and social worlds through shared meaning and cumulative culture, turning ecological challenges into opportunities for invention.

For readers drawn to radical hope, Fuentes offers a grounded, affirming perspective: humans are fundamentally imaginative, cooperative niche-creators. He shows how failure, diversity, and even constructive conflict are not flaws but essential ingredients of creative solutions—and why recognizing this “creative spark” matters if we hope to build more just and sustainable futures.

"Creativity is built on interconnections of ideas, experience, and imagination. … We are creative every day. But we do not accomplish this miraculous feat on our own…creativity is the space between the material reality and our imagination where intelligence, adaptability, agency, interpretation, and problem solving all come together, but [Ian Hodder] also emphasizes that it is a thoroughly social process."

"…creativity is at the very root of how we evolved and why we are the way we are. It’s our ability to move back and forth between the realms of “what is” and “what could be” that has enabled us to reach beyond being a successful species to become an exceptional one…our distinctively human capacity for shared intentionality coupled with our imagination is how we became who we are today."‍‍

BOOK: The Creative Spark