James Suzman is an anthropologist specialising in the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa. A recipient of the Smuts Commonwealth Fellowship in African Studies at Cambridge University, he is now the director of Anthropos Ltd, a think tank that applies anthropological methods to solving contemporary social and economic problems. He has written for publications including the New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Independent, and has advised organisations including the Foreign Office, the World Bank and the European Commission. He lives in Cambridge.

The work we do brings us meaning, moulds our values, determines our social status and dictates how we spend most of our time. But this wasn't always the case: for 95% of our species' history, work held a radically different importance.

How, then, did work become the central organisational principle of our societies? How did it transform our bodies, our environments, our views on equality and our sense of time? And why, in a time of material abundance, are we working more than ever before?

Leading anthropologist James Suzman charts a revolutionary new history of humankind through the prism of work, from the origins of life on Earth to our ever-more automated present, challenging some of our deepest assumptions about who we are.

A groundbreaking history of work, which exposes the productivity-at-all-costs mindset to strike a blow at the myth of the economic problem. I learned something new on every page

Brilliant . I thought I had read enough by now to know what work is and we so often feel compelled to work - but I was wrong

Automation of all kinds looms on the horizon. Luckily, James Suzman is here with a revelatory new history that makes a persuasive case: that human industry can light a path forward, even in a future where we're put out of work by our own inventions

Chronicles how much humankind can still learn from the disappearing way of life of the most marginalised communities on earth

Elegant and absorbing . Rich with ethnographic detail, stylish, perceptive, compassionate and, ultimately, tragic