Penny Spikins
is Senior Lecturer in the Archaeology of Human Origins in the
Department of Archaeology,
University of York. One of her
main areas of research is on the archaeological evidence for the evolution
of empathy and compassion. "My early research centred on Mesolithic northern England where I retain
an interest and enthusiasm, although I'm best known for my later research
into the emergence of autism and the evolution of empathising and
compassion in the Palaeolithic."Penny is writing a book titled, 'How
Compassion Made Us Human: An archaeology of prehistoric sentiment,'
We discussed;
why it is important that compassion was key to our
evolutionary history.
how archaeological evidence can tell us about how compassion evolved.
how a capacity to put others first in modern hunter-gatherers works to
help them survive, not just as a group but as individual (which helps us
understand the evolutionary pressures in the stone age).
the building blocks of capacities to put others first in apes, and how
humans take those capacities to another level. Sub Conference:
Science
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"We are increasingly aware of the role of emotions and
emotional construction in social relationships. However, despite their
significance, there are few constructs or theoretical approaches to the
evolution of emotions that can be related to the prehistoric
archaeological record. Whilst we frequently discuss how archaic humans
might havethought,
how theyfeltmight
seem to be beyond the realm of academic inquiry. In this paper we aim to
open up the debate into the construction of emotion in early prehistory
by proposing key stages in the emotional motivation to help others; the
feeling ofcompassion,
in human evolution. We review existing literature on compassion and
highlight what appear to be particularly significant thresholds in the
development of compassion for human social relationships and the
evolution of the human mind."
pdf
"Compassion is key to what we feel makes us ‘human’. Compassion binds us
together, and
acts of unselfish compassion inspire us and in troubled times give us
hope for the world. Yet
compassion is also remarkably fragile and elusive. As soon as we feel
stressed or under
pressure we can easily lose our sense of compassion for others (or
indeed for ourselves), and
as soon as we seek to understand or analyse our own sense of compassion
we lose our
feeling of this emotion.
This apparent fragility of compassion makes addressing the
evidence for its development in our most ancient ancestors a unique
challenge, yet the
archaeological record nonetheless has an important story to tell about
the prehistory of
compassion. In this volume we review the archaeological evidence for
what can be seen as
compassionate behaviour from our earliest ancestors to later archaic
humans including the
Neanderthals to modern humans like ourselves. Through discussing the
evidence for a deep
seated capacity to care in our ancient past we hope to begin to tell the
story of the
prehistory of compassion and perhaps to inspire further research. "
