How care for the vulnerable could have driven human evolution

The headline version of this argument, in the press coverage it attracted, was that our ancestors turned poor genes into an advantage. That is not what the research says, and the distortion is worth clearing away first, because the actual claim is more interesting than the tabloid one.

The argument is about groups and emotions, not about genes. It holds that pro-social emotional motivations — compassion, tolerance, emotional sensitivity — were a driving force in human evolution, and that the capacity to care for vulnerable members of a group is central rather than incidental to what happened to our lineage.

Who is arguing it

Penny Spikins is a professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. Her early work was on Mesolithic northern England, including a major excavation project at Mesolithic sites in the Pennines and underwater fieldwork in the north-east, and she retains that interest. She is better known now for the evolution of social emotions and the significance of care for the vulnerable in human origins.

The published output is unusually spread across problems that turn out to be the same problem. Papers on the evolution of compassion and its identification in the past, in Time and Mind and World Archaeology. The dynamics of egalitarianism, in the Journal of World Prehistory and Open Quaternary. The origins of autism, in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal and elsewhere. Neanderthal childhood, in the Oxford Archaeological Journal. The origins of healthcare and medicine, in World Archaeology and Quaternary Science Reviews. And, unexpectedly, the role of trust and reputation in the form of Palaeolithic handaxes.

Her book How Compassion Made Us Human was published by Pen and Sword. Hidden Depths, with White Rose University Press, makes the fuller case that pro-social emotional motivation drove human evolution, and that the emergence of these capacities can be traced in archaeological evidence.

The evidential problem

Emotions do not fossilise. Any claim about prehistoric compassion has to be built from material that survives, and the strongest available evidence is negative in form: someone is alive who should not be.

A healed fracture that would have immobilised a person for months implies that somebody fed them during those months. A skeleton showing a condition incompatible with independent foraging implies sustained support from others. The inference is not that the group felt tenderly; it is that resources moved towards someone who could not obtain them, repeatedly, over a long period, and that this happened often enough to leave a pattern rather than a single anomaly.

The handaxe work approaches the same question from an unlikely angle. If the form of a tool carries information about the maker’s skill and self-control, then tool form is partly a reputational signal, which means the social environment it was made in rewarded reputation. That is evidence about sociality obtained from stone rather than from bone.

Where the argument is contested

Two things need separating.

That prehistoric humans and Neanderthals cared for injured and ill members of their groups is not seriously disputed. The osteological evidence is there, and the discussion is about how much care and for how long rather than whether it happened.

The causal claim is where the disagreement sits. Saying that pro-social emotion was a driving force in human evolution is stronger than saying it was present, and stronger than saying it was selected for once other changes were underway. Critics of this class of argument point out that almost any trait can be narrated as a driver after the fact, and that archaeological evidence underdetermines the direction of causation. Spikins’ response, in effect, is to keep specifying the capacities narrowly enough that each one generates its own testable expectation in the record.

Why disability organisations picked it up

The coverage that carried this work outside archaeology travelled through disability networks, including the bulletins of the Asia-Pacific Development Center on Disability. The reason is not hard to see, and it is not the same as the reason a newspaper picked it up.

For advocacy, the useful content is that care is not a modern moral accomplishment layered over a brutal natural baseline. If support for vulnerable members of a group is old, common and traceable, then the framing of inclusion as a costly departure from nature is an empirical claim, and the archaeology does not support it.

That is a considerably more defensible statement than anything about turning poor genes into an advantage, and it does not require the causal argument to be settled.