How Compassion Made Us Human

An intriguing look at how our capacity to care about and connect with others has contributed to our evolutionary success as a species.

 


Our ability to care about the wellbeing of others, whether they are close family or strangers, can appear to be unimportant in today's competitive societies. But in this volume, archaeologist Penny Spikins argues that compassion lies at the heart of what makes us human.


 


She takes us on a journey from the earliest Stone Age societies two million years ago to the lives of Neanderthals in Ice Age Europe, using archaeological evidence to illustrate the central role that emotional connections had in human evolution. Simple acts of kindness left to us from millions of years ago provide evidence for how social emotions and morality evolved, and how our capacity to reach out beyond ourselves into the lives of others allowed us to work together for a common good—and form the basis for human success.