How Compassion Made Us Human: The Evolutionary Origins of Tenderness, Trust and Morality

How Compassion Made Us Human: The Evolutionary Origins of Tenderness, Trust and Morality
ISBN-10
1781593108
ISBN-13
9781781593103
Category
History
Pages
281
Language
English
Published
2015-05-07
Publisher
Pen and Sword
Author
Penny Spikins

Description

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.

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