How Compassion Made Us Human

The Evolutionary Origins of Tenderness, Trust & Morality

Penelope Spikins

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Archaeology
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781473860179
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Evolution
• Index: Biological Sciences

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.

PART ONE

The Mystery

Depiction of two mammoths at Rouffignac Cave, France, around 15,000 years old.¹

Prologue

Deep inside a long dark cave, I found myself in front of a remarkable image, 15,000 years old. I was eleven years old, on a family holiday and visiting Rouffignac Cave in the Dordogne. Television documentaries had painted a picture of human ancestors valiantly surviving in the harsh savannah. School books told me about grubby cavemen wearing skins, living harsh and brutal lives and I was desperate to find out more about this lost world.

I was determined to see for myself some of the Palaeolithic cave art sites that dated back to this far distant time. Going down deep damp caves on a sunny day was the least pleasant thing my parents could imagine, so I insisted I was fine by myself, was given my ticket and joined the throngs while they stayed at the entrance. I’d done this several times before at different caves and just as I hoped, it had never been so easy to fit into a tour group. If anyone looked at me quizzically I’d sidle up to the nearest French family and try and look as if I belonged to them. I was scared of the dark, so as we walked ever deeper into the caves I tried not to panic. As always, the blackness closed in and strange bodies pressed into me, far closer than I was used to, moving me forward. I was certain that if I showed how scared I was someone would return me to the entrance and I’d miss everything I’d come for. Every time the guide shouted some warning in French I would painfully bump my head against the stalactites overhead a few seconds later. It hurt, tears came to my eyes and the strangers stared at me. Worried they were about to question why I was alone, I tried to look confident, and if at all possible – and I wasn’t sure how to do this – definitely French.

It was all worth it for that moment of awe I felt standing in front of a drawing of ice-age mammoths, seemingly entranced looking into each other’s eyes. These almost cartoon-like depictions, with a few quick strokes of colour, were done so adeptly and preserved so finely that they looked as though they were made yesterday. Here was what I had come for. For at that moment I was presented with the existence of a different world, only a few feet away yet separated by many thousands of years. This was a place where people wore skins, hunted large animals with stone weapons and roamed among long-extinct species like mammoths, woolly rhinoceros and sabre-toothed cats. How could peoples desperate for survival, living such harsh and brutal lives be capable not only of fine artistic expression, but of capturing in a few strokes a sense of connection between two beings? How could the sense of tenderness and humanity I felt looking at this image possibly be in keeping with what I had been told about the world from which it came? While the guide talked in French, for me there was no explanation, no dates, no interpretations or theories, and perhaps that was part of the magic. I was simply eleven years of age and face to face with the vast depths of our existence, a moment that decided for me there and then that I wanted to find out where we had come from, to make sense of the bones, tools and fragments of art left behind all those thousands, even millions of years ago. Someone said something, people left, and I realised I had to follow them, wondering if I would ever return and if the mystery would make more sense to me when I did.

It was to be many years later before I myself excavated remains of the occupation sites of people from the cultures that had created this art, and had a chance to uncover even older finds dating to earlier species of human and further distant periods in time, even directing my own excavations of prehistoric hunting and gathering peoples. It was even longer before I would return to Rouffignac, contemplating everything I had found out.

There was a long journey ahead of me. I remember to this day the sense of awe I felt when I first uncovered and held a tool last touched by a Neanderthal around 60,000 years ago. By then I was a young student on excavation at a site called Les Tares in south-west France. As I turned the flint scraper around in my hand, the first to do so since it was abandoned, I couldn’t help but notice how easily the maker had taken off flakes and formed a tool that was in so many ways ‘beautiful’ compared to my own recent stumbling efforts at making flint tools. The time separating us seemed at that moment slightly immaterial compared to my sense that we were both in many ways human. I felt then as though I’d been transported into some science fiction story, where different beings mingled together and talked about the everyday experience of making things. Only weeks before we had discussed the demise of the Neanderthals in class in the tone that was so praising of the success of our own species compared to our apparently less quick-witted or efficient Neanderthal contemporaries. We were rather pleased with ourselves that evolution gave us full marks and the Neanderthals got second place. It was clear to me in that moment nonetheless that this supposedly ‘brutish’ Neanderthal was a very great deal better at making elegant flint tools than I was. I couldn’t help but wonder if our supposed ‘superiority’ might not have been a matter of chance and circumstance.

From the art to the everyday tools left behind by our earliest ancestors, the connection they give us to people who lived in far distant worlds thousands or even millions of years ago touches something inside us. Much as we look at the stars and feel a speck in the enormity of the universe, when we find ourselves face to face with the real physical world of our ancestors we can’t help but wonder about our place in a great story which lies beyond our own lives.

We don’t know if Neanderthals wondered about their place in the cosmos or sought explanation for their existence, but evidence from Neanderthal burials and from what we can gather from their brains suggest that they did. A need to understand who we are may date back at least half a million years, meaning that origin myths and explanatory stories will have been told around campfires for millennia after millennia. I’m sure that, like Greek myths or aboriginal dreamtime tales, these ancient explanations were colourful stories which held within them many important messages about how to negotiate the complex emotional worlds we build up with other people.

Only in the last two hundred years of our existence, the most recent moments of our time on earth, have we as a species been faced with the reality of our pasts and uncovered real objects we know to have been made by early humans. But what we find often seems a world away from engaging fantasies. At best, the real lives of our ancestors appear to us in nuggets of evidence, mostly discarded parts of everyday lives, tiny fragments of a larger picture which we piece together into the best explanation we can, despite the missing pieces. Unlike in myths or stories where we are free to imagine things the way we would like them to be, what we know about people can’t be assumed or invented, and even less so the further back in time we travel and the more alien the people we meet become. Of course, the archaeological evidence for our real origin story appeals to us because of its promise of hard truth. Yet unlike the explanations we would like to find or stories we could invent, it is much more gritty and each new discovery is almost always a challenge to what we think we know, rarely if ever fitting in with what we would like to believe about ourselves. We are never quite sure if we want the past to tell us how innately good we are, how bad they were, or how much better we have become and how far this colours what we say.

Thirty years later when I returned to Rouffignac cave much appeared to have changed. The gift shop sold many more knick-knacks and the toilets were newly tiled and sparkling. After many years of reading and research, not to mention writing my own books and papers, I had changed too. At least now I understood most of the conversations around me and was no longer so small as to be squashed. Now I was here as a specialist myself, visiting on a tour after a conference on human evolution. Of course I was still a bit nervous of the dark, that much never changed, and I still gritted my teeth to cover that up – heaven forbid that my learned colleagues would see me whimper. But when we reached the same spot the mammoths were exactly the same as they had been when I was a child, the same as they had been for thousands of years and will be, we assume, for many thousands of years to come. Once again, I still stood and wondered, and pondered who I was in the enormity of time, feeling that I could almost touch the hand of the painter it was so real. I still felt there was something to learn, but wasn’t sure quite what. In this volume I’d like to take you with me on a journey to try to find out what the evidence from our distant past can tell us about who we are.

John Frere included an illustration of a particularly elegant handaxe in his letter to the Society of Antiquaries in 1797. The form of the handaxe had convinced him that it must have been made by human hands -people who must have lived in a very remote period from our own.

Chapter One

Origin Stories

Stories do not tell us what to do, externally, but transform who we are, internally. And the most powerful, or perhaps the most complex and ambiguous, or perhaps again the most flexible, of these stories become … a vibrating string which sets in motion a hundred harmonic frequencies whose connections have been built up over many generations.¹

Here we introduce the archaeological evidence as the hard ‘truth’ about our ancestors. However, archaeological discoveries rarely fit into the picture we would like to have of early humans and what we want to believe about what makes us ‘human The interpretations which appear to fit into how we see ourselves can be given pride of place even when there are obvious problems with the inferences on which they are based. We follow this narrative through – from biblical versions that were believed despite the earliest finds of stone tools, to ideas which ignored the similarities between apes and humans; to the Piltdown, skull which was accepted as an ancestor because of its large brain; to the ‘killer apes’ theory accepted after the Second World War. Lastly, we consider how our current interpretations of human origins emphasise the efficiency and economic self-interest so highly regarded in our present-day culture.

Most societies have had the good fortune to feel comfortable about what it means to be human. Myths and legends made the world an understandable place. The actions of spirits or gods explained why the world was the way it was and what caused inexplicable things to happen. While these explanations might not have been right, they allowed us to get on with our lives without worrying about what we, as humans, were doing here.

Discoveries during the early nineteenth century were to shatter these comfortable beliefs and call into question where we came from, and why.² The uncovering of artefacts from what was to be called the ‘Stone Age’ marked the beginning of a long journey of self-discovery.

A find of a handaxe in sediments at Hoxne in Suffolk by John Frere in 1787 first sparked a debate as to its origins.³ A few such finds could be ignored but during the first few decades of the nineteenth century flint tools in ancient layers were discovered alongside extinct animals more and more frequently. Such finds were a challenge – they must have been made by human hands, and seemed to call into question the accepted biblical story of human history. Were these really the work of peoples living thousands of years ago? What could these savages have been like? Early geologists were both awed and disturbed by such finds. Charles Lyell wrote:

No subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among geologists and the public than the question of the Antiquity of the Human Race, – whether or no we have sufficient evidence in caves, or in the superficial deposits commonly called drift or ‘diluvium,’ to prove the former co-existence of man with certain extinct mammalia. For the last half-century, the occasional occurrence, in various parts of Europe, of the bones of Man or the works of his hands, in cave-breccias and stalagmites, associated with the remains of the extinct hyæna, bear, elephant, or rhinoceros, has given rise to a suspicion that the date of Man must be carried further back than we had heretofore imagined. On the other hand, extreme reluctance was naturally felt, on the part of scientific reasoners, to admit the validity of such evidence.⁴

Finding stone tools made by humans so clearly deposited alongside extinct animals might seem to us to be pretty conclusive evidence for the ‘antiquity’ of humans. At the time, however, it was difficult to overturn comfortable accepted wisdom for an idea so new and challenging. Anyone holding in their hands a handaxe, found deep in sediments alongside bones of animals such as mammoths, couldn’t help but recognise a deeply subversive idea forming in their mind about where we had come from. It wasn’t a welcome idea to voice.

For a while the ‘Stone Age’ was uncomfortably – and to our minds, slightly bizarrely – slotted into biblical chronologies. Debate over the ‘Great Antiquity of Man’ and how it could, or could not, be fitted into a biblical timescale raged on for many decades. The biblical flood might explain extinct animals, but what of the flint tools? Human bones associated with ancient animals were explained as coincidental. In 1824 Paul Buckland commented: ‘the human bones are not of the same antiquity as those of the antediluvian animals that occur in the same caves with them.’⁵ Even the first find of a Neanderthal in the 1820s, a species clearly not human, had done nothing to move the debate forward. Of course, the find, from Engis Caves in Belgium, was of a child’s cranium and so was assumed to be unimportant. Such remains of Neanderthal children, often seen as insignificant compared with those of adults, have sometimes even been lost in museums.

Only by the 1860s did the sheer depth of sediments under which such tools were found and the range of animals they were found with become commonly accepted proofs of antiquity beyond that of the Bible. For the first time in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Part One: The Mystery
• Part Two: The Strands of Evidence
• Part Three: A New Story
• Notes