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How Compassion Made Us Human: The origins of tenderness, trust and morality
Abstract
Our capacity to care about the wellbeing of others, whether they are close family or strangers, can appear to be unimportant in today's competitive societies. However, in this volume 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.
... Vol. 19 Is. 3 (2024) In her book, Spikins (2015) analyses compassion in human evolution, suggesting that tenderness, trust, and moral behaviours were crucial for survival and development. Using various burial evidence, she argues for the importance of empathy and care in human history, challenging traditional views focused on competition and aggression. ...
... According to Petru, some individuals may have held prestigious positions due to their uncommon appearance, causing fear after their death due to belief in their exceptional powers. This interpretation focuses on negative emotions rather than compassion, as argued by Spikins (2015). Unfortunately, Petru provides only a brief conclusion without a detailed analysis. ...
... This overview indicates that emotions related to prehistoric burial contexts are read on several levels: 1) emotions experienced prior to death, during the life of the individual, such as compassion, empathy, fear; and 2) emotions felt after death, such as fear, sadness, sorrow, anxiety, and those related to closeness. The contrasting perspectives of Spikins (2015) and Petru (2018) on the same remains highlight the challenges in drawing accurate emotional conclusions from material evidence, rather than being the result of the author's imagination and creativity. ...
Experiencing and processing emotions, especially profound grief following a significant loss, provides deep personal insights and understanding that can inform the study of emotional practices and customs related to death and mourning. This paper explores how emotions, from basic to complex, are studied through historical artefacts, evolutionary biology, and cultural contexts, emphasizing their interconnectedness with cognition and behaviour in material culture, their biological underpinnings in brain development, and their manifestations as both group and collective phenomena in societal and interpersonal contexts. Death and funeral contexts offer opportunities to study emotions before and after death. Archaeological remains indicate mortuary rituals, customs, and human behaviour, which allows us to consider incorporating emotional narratives in prehistoric research by surveying conclusions from psychological, ethnographic, anthropological, sociological, historical, and medical studies.
... It emerged partly as subordinates began to gang up and shun, exclude or even kill aggressive controlling (mostly) males (Boehm, 1999). Caring and sharing became especially adaptive during the human shift to hunter gatherers (Narvaez, 2017;Narvaez & Bradshaw, 2023;Spikins, 2015). Indeed, many psychophysiological changes occurred in this period including to our hormone systems (e.g. ...
... Unregulated competitive societies that lack a compassionate framework are problematic for humans because our bodies and brains basically function best in safe, caring and sharing environments Gilbert, 1989Gilbert, , 2019Keltner et al., 2014;Narvaez & Bradshaw, 2023;Petrocchi & Cheli 2019;Slavich, 2020). As noted above, our ancestors began to evolve different solutions to resource control which was to reduce threat-based hierarchies and replace them with egalitarianism and resource sharing, in what were to become hunter-gatherer lifestyles (Boehm, 1999;Dunbar, 2014Dunbar, , 2022Spikins, 2015Spikins, , 2022. In hunter-gatherer groups, where group size was rarely above 150, people knew each other from the day they were born to the day they died and where resources were/are scarce, and caring, sharing and egalitarianism were/are essential for survival (Boehm, 1999;Narvaez & Bradshaw, 2023;Ryan, 2019). ...
... Kessler (2020) highlighted that this behaviour is noted in ants and many other species and can underpin certain forms of human caring. Spikins (2015Spikins ( , 2022 suggested that rescuing and caring for sick and injured individuals was a major element of hunter-gatherer societies and is key to our evolution for compassion. Indeed, humans are highly motivated to rescue others and care for them when ill. ...
The editors to this volume posed a series of fascinating questions relating to how seeing compassion as a skill can help us understand its nature, cultivation and effects within secular contexts. This paper addresses these questions by comparing evolutionary with contemplative approaches to compassion. Recent scientific approaches have explored the evolved roots and biopsychosocial manifestations of compassion and their impact on mental states and prosocial behaviour, particularly in regard to both its facilitators and inhibitors. In contrast, we discuss how the contemplative traditions have approached the origins and cultivation of compassion through observing the mind (e.g. meditation), with a focus on gaining insight into self-transcendent experiences, the nature of inter-connectivity and non-separate existence (also referred to as non-duality), through which compassion arises naturally. Both evolutionary and contemplative perspectives have the same focus which is to understand and prevent the causes of suffering, including the suffering we cause ourselves because of our harmful potentials. However, in terms of training the mind in compassion skills, this paper considers how training approaches linked to the evolutionary model often use thinking, empathising, reflecting and guided behaviour change to activate psychophysiological systems linked to caring and compassion. In contrast, the contemplative traditions focus less on thinking and reflecting and more on creating conditions for direct experiencing. A key reason for doing so is to settle the mind so that subtler levels of consciousness can enable the experience of self-transcendent compassion to arise. Thus, both evolutionary and contemplative approaches can focus on developing mind awareness and the importance of practise, but evolutionary approaches such as compassion focused therapy do not pursue transcendent wisdoms or insights.
... is requires the rst component of compassion and its focus on noticing. Recent research by Spikins (2015) and Godinho et al. (2018) on the evolution of human facial expressions suggests that modern humans have developed quizzical eyebrows (as Homo sapiens lost the strong, thick bony brow ridges of their ancient ancestors) as a result of human evolution where effective social communication in hunter-gatherer teams became important. From this, Spikins (2015) and also Godinho et al. (2018) conclude that the evolution of smaller, atter faces may have facilitated the social power of the eyebrow, allowing humans to communicate at a distance in more complex and nuanced ways as muscles in the face developed to move the eyebrows up and down expressively for more subtle communications. ...
... Recent research by Spikins (2015) and Godinho et al. (2018) on the evolution of human facial expressions suggests that modern humans have developed quizzical eyebrows (as Homo sapiens lost the strong, thick bony brow ridges of their ancient ancestors) as a result of human evolution where effective social communication in hunter-gatherer teams became important. From this, Spikins (2015) and also Godinho et al. (2018) conclude that the evolution of smaller, atter faces may have facilitated the social power of the eyebrow, allowing humans to communicate at a distance in more complex and nuanced ways as muscles in the face developed to move the eyebrows up and down expressively for more subtle communications. ...
Introduction
Associated with learning and social isolation from each other during the pandemic-driven transition to online platforms in Higher Education (HE), many students were, and remain, reluctant to turn on their video cameras to be present with each other during their online meetings.
Using the Compassionate Mind Foundation's definition of compassion, not as an emotion, but as a psychobiological motivation to take wise action to help when self or others struggle, this comparative study examined (a) the deployment by students during online, task-focused group/team meetings, of taught verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that were explicitly compassionate and (b) the effects of these strategies on each other's social and learning experiences in these meetings, compared to when they did not use them.
Methods
Twenty-four STEM students from a sample of five Sri Lankan universities, were mixed, then divided into six groups of four students per group. This mixed-methods study, video-recorded and analyzed each group's task-focused group meetings before, then after, an online interactive 90-min training session (the intervention) in the Cognitive Skills of Compassionate Communications (CSCC) for groups/teams.
Results
Using R, SPSS and Microsoft Excel to analyse the quantitative data, a statistically significant improvement in students' screen-gaze attentiveness was identified after the CSCC intervention. The qualitative data analysis explained this and other behavioral changes that were shown to enhance students' social and learning experiences in their online meetings.
Given the strong historical and political drivers of current divisions across Sri Lankan student communities, these findings call for more urgent research on compassion as a cognitive competence for accelerating group/team cohesion and criticality across HE, and beyond.
... La organización social, la creación y conservación de asentamientos y el desarrollo de variadas prácticas culturales y económicas han sustentado lo que hoy entendemos como sociedad y civilización. Agruparse ha sido una manera de sobrevivir y de buscar vivir bien, esto con base en la organización, el intercambio, la solidaridad, así como también en la diferenciación social, sumado al control y aprovechamiento de las condiciones ambientales y sociales que rodearan a -o fueran parte de-algunos grupos humanos (Spikins, 2018). ...
Este artículo busca ampliar la discusión en torno a los animales no humanos y nuestra relación con ellos como sociedad, teniendo como propósito sintetizar algunas de las conexiones existentes entre la liberación animal, el especismo, la discriminación, la dominación y el exterminio. Para lograrlo se reflexionará en torno al tratamiento de la otredad y se tomarán de referencia momentos históricos donde la especie-población humana ha sido devaluada y asemejada a la vida animal, con las consecuencias que supone aquello. De esta manera, se citarán casos como los zoológicos humanos, las políticas de eugenesia, la erradicación de disidencia política, todo con el fin de ampliar la comprensión de los sistemas de pensamiento, valores y acciones que no solo preceden y fundamentan las estructuras sociales actuales, sino que a nivel cotidiano configuran nuestras interpretaciones del mundo social y las relaciones que establecemos en contextos de permanente coexistencia multiespecie.
... Empirical evidence confirms the evolutionary model of compassion (S. L. Gilbert, 2016;Goetz et al., 2010;Mayseless, 2016;Spikins, 2015). According to this model, compassion evolved as a distinct emotion and trait to (a) enhance the wellbeing of vulnerable offspring, (b) facilitate mate selection processes, and (c) promote cooperative relations among nonkin (Goetz et al., 2010;Keltner, 2009). ...
There is a lack of consensus on the definition of compassion among mental health professionals. In addition, mental health professionals also differ in how compassion is connected to related constructs including pity, sympathy, and empathy. This article explores the evolution of compassion from ancient times to contemporary conceptualization in western mental health treatment. Application of compassion in therapeutic practice, mindfulness, and wellness is discussed.
... This bodily-cognitive entanglement also sheds light on the most genuine human faculties, as ethics and normative judgment. Compassion and empathy are deeply rooted in human history, as reflected in fossils of healed skeletal injuries (Spikins 2015). The oldest record is from Lake Turkana, where a female Australopithecus afarensis broke her left femur 3,4 million years ago. ...
Homo sapiens encapsulates peculiarities otherwise unseen in the biosphere: self-consciousness, language, reason, altruism, and extensive cultural inheritance—traits sometimes labelled ‘the human syndrome’. The topic has mainly been studied along two separate pathways: along cognitive or along bodily features. However, the upcoming concept of embodied cognition offers a suitable pathway to explore how mind and matter interact. By means of phenomenology, this conceptual paper explores the human syndrome as a systemic mind-body interaction over evolutionary time. The essential crossroad of hominin evolution is verticalization of the spinal cord and bodily uprightness. This habit poses a challenge to the traditional adaptationist programme, as it comprises substantial anatomical drawbacks. Uprightness, moreover, is not solely maintained by neuromuscular reflexes but by conscious involvement, too. Human locomotion is a psychophysical dance, culturally induced and actively maintained by the balancing self. From supporting the trunk in quadrupeds, forelimbs became hands and arms, as tools serving the mind. Verticalization also favoured enhanced awareness of three-dimensionality of the environment and deliberate use of forelimbs to manipulate it. Release of forelimbs was in turn decisive for uncoupling respiration from locomotive functions, as a conditioner for language, which probably emerged from gestural expressions during the Homo erectus period. Finally, language became the prelude for the upper Palaeolithic cognitive transition to reason and representation, as recognizable in cave art.
Upright posture, language, and reason accordingly summarize the nested evolutionary history of hominins, where each competence became precursor for the next: Uprighness gave birth to language, which in turn became the pathway for reason. Ultimately, verticalization emerges as the ultimate reason for ethical conceptions, accomplished as beauty, truth, and goodness.
This chapter outlines a compassion-focused therapy (CFT) approach to schizotypy. As CFT is an evolution-informed biopsychosocial approach, the chapter explores the key evolved processes underpinning CFT and the way in which many are compromised in schizotypy. Rather than focusing on a general CFT approach, this chapter focuses specifically on self-to-self relating in the form of self-criticism and self-reassurance/compassion.
The present research used archaeological data, i.e., the data obtained from kamekan jar burials in the Mikuni Hills of the northern Kyushu area in the Middle Yayoi period, to test the parochial altruism model. This model argued that out-group hate and in-group favor coevolved via prehistoric intergroup conflicts. If this model is accurate, such an out-group hate and in-group favor could be reflected in the archaeological remains, such as pottery making; the more frequent intergroup conflicts are and the more each group is opposed, the more independent and coherent each group will be and more evident cultural identity could be established within each group. We employed an elliptic Fourier analysis for the shapes of kamekan jar burials. We examined whether frequent intergroup conflicts in the period influenced kamekan jar pottery between subareas of the Mikuni Hills. The results suggested that the shapes of kamekan jar burials after the KIIIa type are slightly different between subareas, which is partially consistent with the model. However, the results do not support the model directly.
Este artículo discute el papel de la neuroeducación en los procesos de enseñanza-aprendizaje desde una perspectiva humanística. Porque, a pesar de haber captado la atención de la comunidad científica y educativa, con la creciente complejidad en el diseño y la metodología educativa, algunos docentes pueden experimentar una suerte de "neurofobia". Aunque, se reconoce que, debido a varios cambios axiales a lo largo de la historia, la educación está en constante cambio. Estos cambios han sido impulsados por convergencias en la ciencia, la tecnología, entre otros aspectos. Sin embargo, con dicha complejidad, se aboga la necesidad de equilibrar la innovación con la consideración de los "elementos esenciales de la educación". Estos elementos esenciales, también persistentes a lo largo de la historia, están intrínsecamente ligados a la inteligencia humana y, en consecuencia, a la creación de culturas. Los humanos avanzamos mediante la resolución de problemas utilizando nuestra inteligencia. Estas soluciones se cristalizan en nuestra cultura y, a su vez, influencian nuestra inteligencia. Nuestros deseos desencadenan la inteligencia, generando emociones que movilizan la maquinaria neurocognitiva para tomar decisiones y actuar. Sin embargo, es esencial que humanicemos nuestra inteligencia educándola en valores para evitar sesgos cognitivos y propiciar decisiones que sean en beneficio para todos. Asimismo, es necesario adoptar una actitud de "valentía del hacer" para convertir las decisiones en acciones, pero siendo críticos antes que valientes, y en búsqueda de la felicidad colectiva. No debemos olvidar estimular el desarrollo de las tres grandes revoluciones cognitivas: la representación mental, el lenguaje y la lectoescritura. Igualmente, es importante apoyar la educación como inversión en capital humano y social, para ayudar a superar obstáculos significativos para el progreso humano, como el miedo, el odio, los prejuicios, la ignorancia y la pobreza. En conclusión, la educación debe trascender de la mera exposición de conocimientos instrumentales y sofisticados, y en su lugar, enfatizar en la esencialidad de formar individuos con capacidad para entender y enriquecer su cultura, para no solo acceder a la información, sino también manejar el conocimiento y progresar en cualquier contexto. Porque educar es más que estar al día, es sembrar el progreso.
Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies? provides the answers to the questions about corpses that professionals and layman alike want to, but were afraid to ask: What really does happen to a body after death? What does our culture do with corpses and what have other cultures done? How does a body really turn to dust? What happens during autopsies, dissection, embalming, cremation, and cryogenic preservation? How do we transport bodies and what does a medical examiner really do? How about the more bizarre uses for corpses, such as cannibalism, body snatching, and use in the secret rites of various cultures?
In more than 800 pages, this book gives the latest information on organ and tissue donation and the arcane and secretive world of the funeral industry.
We rarely speak about death—because it is the pornography of our culture and we know so little about it. This book sheds some light into dark corners of our society and proves that, once again, truth is stranger than fiction.
William Buckland (1784–1856), Dean of Westminster, was an English geologist best known for his contributions to palaeontology. He became the first Reader in Geology at the University of Oxford in 1818. Buckland spent 1819–1822 investigating fossil remains in caves, in order to refine his concept of catastrophism. His research led him to the realisation that hyena remains in Kirkland Cave, Yorkshire, were the remains of an ancient ecosystem and were not relics of the Flood; this led to his being awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society of London in 1822. This volume, first published in 1823, contains a full account of Buckland's influential research in Kirkland Cave, which demonstrated for the first time the ability of scientific analysis to reconstruct events from deep time. Buckland's support for and influential revision of the concept of catastrophism is also illustrated in this volume.
Sir Charles Lyell (1797–1875) is remembered today as much for his profound influence on the young Charles Darwin as for his own work as a geologist: Darwin read the three volumes of his Principles of Geology (1830–3) as they came out, and was greatly interested in Lyell's theory of the huge effects over geological time of an accumulation of tiny, almost unobservable changes. The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man was published in 1863, and went into three editions in that year alone. The work synthesises the then existing evidence for the earliest humans in Europe and North America and – as indicated by its subtitle, With Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation – discusses Darwin's theory and 'the bearing of this hypothesis on the different races of mankind and their connection with other parts of the animal kingdom.'
Book synopsis: It is almost universally accepted among writers on warfare that battle is a terrible experience, and that men who fight are at the very least sobered, and often deeply traumatized, by the horrors of combat. Bourke uses the letters, diaries, memoirs and reports of veterans from three conflicts - the First World War, the Second World War and the Vietnam War - to establish a picture of the man-at-arms. She suggests that the structure of war encourages pleasure in killing, and that perfectly ordinary, gentle human beings can become enthusiastic killers without becoming 'brutalized'. Bourke forces the reader to face some disconcerting truths about societies that can so easliy organize themselves for war.