Table Of ContentBook-How Compassion Made_How Compassion Made 21/04/2015 18:17 Page 1
HOW COMPASSION
MADE US HUMAN
Book-How Compassion Made_How Compassion Made 21/04/2015 18:17 Page 2
Book-How Compassion Made_How Compassion Made 21/04/2015 18:17 Page 3
HOW COMPASSION
MADE US HUMAN
The Evolutionary Origins of
Tenderness, Trust and Morality
Penny Spikins
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First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Pen & Sword ArchAeoloGy
an imprint of
Pen and Sword Books ltd
47 church Street
Barnsley
South yorkshire S70 2AS
copyright © Penny Spikins, 2015
ISBn 978 1 78159 310 3
The right of Penny Spikins to be identified as the
author of work has been asserted by her in accordance
with the copyright, designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Book-How Compassion Made_How Compassion Made 21/04/2015 18:17 Page 5
Contents
Acknowledgements.................................................................................8
Foreword.................................................................................................9
PART ONE: THE MYSTERY
Prologue...............................................................................................12
As a child I visited rouffignac cave and saw images of mammoths drawn
thousands of years ago. There was nothing in the art that I saw there that
bore any resemblance to the world I had been told of, a world where
brutish cavemen struggled for existence. I couldn’t help wondering what
the art meant about the people of the time and perhaps about us.
Chapter One – Origin Stories...........................................................18
early antiquarians came across handaxes in river gravels and realised that
they must have dated to a far distant period in the past. Such finds made
them question what they thought they knew, and wonder whether there
was anything human in this ancient past. More finds revealed more
evidence. yet no matter how much was uncovered, reconstructions of an
ancient past seemed to be more about assumptions about what ought to
be natural than the evidence itself. could that be as true of our origin
stories today?
Chapter Two – The Killer Ape?........................................................40
raymond dart believed that aggression was innate to humanity and that
he had found three-million-year-old archaeological evidence of the ‘killer
ape’ that led to ourselves. A more detailed study of the evidence would
prove him wrong, but these were not the only signs which might suggest
to us that there was a violent side to our human past. was it ruthless
competition and aggression that made us human?
Chapter Three – A Prehistory of Compassion................................60
The archaeological record also reveals a different side to early humans.
The evidence for people caring for the sick, grieving at the passing of
loved ones, and demonstrating a remarkable sensitivity to aesthetics
challenge the more violent view of our past nature. could early humans
have been kind and caring? why would people care about objects?
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PART TWO: THE STRANDS OF EVIDENCE
Chapter Four –Our Inner Ape?........................................................82
louis leakey sent Jane Goodall to study chimpanzees in Africa in the
wild to find out more about what our common ancestor with chimpanzees
must have been like. Jane’s research eroded almost all the golden barriers
between apes and humans, as well illustrating empathy and compassion
in our nearest living relatives which warmed our hearts. however,
violence between different chimpanzee groups and within the chimpanzee
groups themselves told a harsher story. had Jane uncovered evidence for
an innately violent side to humanity, or were we jumping to conclusions?
was there another story to be told?
Chapter Five – Minds Preserved in Stone.....................................108
If only ancient minds themselves could be preserved and could tell us
how our ancestors felt. yet we are left with only fossilised evidence in
the form of human brain cases. changes in the size and shape of our brains
suggest that pressures to be more social drove human evolution. But was
a drive to understand others about improving their well-being, or was it
about being cunning and manipulative to further our own welfare? The
hardest evidence, from fossil skulls and human bones, proves to be some
of the most easily misinterpreted.
Chapter Six – Small Things Forgotten..........................................126
looking inside our own minds has recently given us remarkable insights
into how our emotional motivations evolved. evidence for a profound
sensitivity, compassion and willingness to help not only living things, but
even to feel for and care about our material world helps us to understand
humanity’s uniqueness. why would we have evolved to respond to and
care about such a wide range of vulnerable things?
Chapter Seven – The Darkest Depths: When People Seem
Like Mere Objects.......................................................................148
People are more complex than being simply nice or nasty. A capacity for
both hatred and dehumanisation are also part of our evolved minds. what
drives us to lose our empathy, and why do some retain their humanity in
the worst of circumstances? how is dehumanisation reflected in our
material worlds?
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Chapter Eight – Why Be Kind? Love, Morality and Why
Small Things Matter......................................................................166
what mechanisms can explain the evolution of human altruism? we
consider the moral instinct of other apes and of our common ancestor.
Forgotten ideas from the nineteenth century cast new light on the
evolution of human morality while contributions from economics explain
why it might pay off to be carried away by one’s feelings. could changes
in human emotions have been the basis for our success, coming before
increases in intelligence or the emergence of language?
PART THREE:A NEW STORY
Chapter Nine –The Path Less Travelled........................................196
do the different strands of evidence lead us to a new story of human
origins? we consider the path taken by Homo erectus, and how a
particular turning point in evolution 1.8 million years ago may have led
to the development of distinctively human emotions. what did
neanderthals feel for each other, and might it have been different from
our own species?
Chapter Ten – How Did It Feel to Live in the Palaeolithic?........220
what was life like in the Upper Palaeolithic? Popular images suggest that
life was brutal, but is there any basis to these assumptions? were modern
human societies of the Upper Palaeolithic even more sensitive, kinder
and more willing to help than our own? Might the societies of the Upper
Palaeolithic have developed an emotional wisdom that we seem to have
forgotten?
Conclusions – A Return to the Cave...............................................242
If we could travel back in the past would we understand what made
humans different? would we be willing to listen to what prehistoric
hunter-gatherers could tell us? The history of our contact with modern
hunting and gathering populations suggests that we might not. Is there
something that we should learn?
notes....................................................................................................256
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Acknowledgements
without Paul Mills this would have been a dull and probably rather
confusing book. his ‘just asking questions’ always helped me see through
to what I wanted to say, and how to express it in a more interesting way,
and his poems are inspirational.
Thanks are also due to my family – their conviction that if I was
writing something it was bound to be interesting may well have been
biased, but was fantastically supportive all the same. over the years the
many students of human origins, with their enquiring minds and creative
spirits, have always been an inspiration, as have so many of my academic
colleagues who share a lifelong commitment to revealing the past – I hope
I have inspired them as much as they have inspired me. Thank you also
to a rural yorkshire village for restoring my faith in humanity and to chris
for his constant support, and moreover for having the self-control not to
mention the part of my illustrations which had obviously come out
wonky-looking.
Thanks is also due to Phil reynolds and Fulford Art class for teaching
me to draw and to be sensitive to depiction – if I hadn’t done my own
illustrations within this volume it wouldn’t have been the same. I’m not
sure what possessed me to decide to draw everything by hand in pen and
ink, however; much like making a handaxe, this means that the slightest
mistake renders the end product useless, and there have been many
mistakes! I’m sure that I’ve learnt something about patience, and an even
greater respect for Homo erectus, along the way.
Thank you to Greg currie, Francis wenban-Smith, Ivan Briz i Godino
and Paul Mills for finding the time and inspiration to say something that
I could quote, Geoff Bailey for his consistent support of my
unconventional approach to the material record of the Palaeolithic and
for spending time to proofread the manuscript and to invaluable
discussions of human compassion within the compassionate Mind
Foundation.
Thank you also to several proofreaders for their enthusiasm and careful
copy-editing, and to eloise hansen at Pen and Sword for her unwavering
commitment to a novel project which changed a great deal from its first
inception.
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Foreword
Until very recently – well into the present century – the idea that
archaeological evidence might throw any light on past human feelings
and emotions would have been dismissed by most archaeologists as
impossible, irrelevant, or at best an exercise in subjective imagination
better suited to the fictional novel than a scientific treatise. As one of my
early archaeological teachers once succinctly put it: the soul leaves no
skeleton. Similarly, emotions have played very little role in 20th century
narratives of human evolution. Violence, it is true, has occasionally made
an appearance, most famously in raymond dart’s killer-ape hypothesis
of human origins, but the evidence dart used has long since been
discredited. otherwise, as Penny Spikins points out in the introduction to
this interesting and important new volume, fashions in evolutionary
explanations have ranged across a wide spectrum, from climate and
environment, to technology, social relationships, economic processes,
increased brain power and developments in cognition and language.
emotions, however, have scarcely made any appearance at all.
This is odd. we are an emotionally complex species, with
characteristics generally regarded as distinctively human, not only in our
ability to inflict cruelty, injury and death on members of our own species,
but also in our capacity to identify with others through powers of empathy
and acts of compassion. Are these qualities relatively recent developments
in human evolution, qualities shared only by fully evolved Homo sapiens
– ‘modern’ humans – along with other features such as language and
symbolism? or are they more deeply embedded in our evolutionary
history? And if so when and why they did they evolve? And how
important have they been in shaping the human evolutionary trajectory
and how variable in their strength and frequency? Are they simply a
hangover of an earlier evolutionary process that no longer serves any
biological purpose, rather like the neuropsychological equivalent of an
appendix, evolved over many hundreds of millennia in our supposedly
early and primitive state as scavengers, hunters and gatherers living in
small groups at low population densities? or do they continue to play a
vital role in our more complex and ever more crowded civilisation? And
how can we go about answering these questions except by the rather
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