For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the evolving perception of Neanderthals and their emotional complexity.
Since the 19th-century discovery of their first known remains in Germany’s Neander Valley, the archaic human species known as Neanderthals have gotten a bad rap. Thanks in part to their stocky proportions and thick brows, they came to exemplify the “caveman” stereotype of archaic humans — primitively aggressive and self-interested, lacking social virtues and refinements. “Our existing narrative has been so much to do with selfish competition that any contrary evidence has been treated like an interesting side story that we can’t really integrate,” says Penny Spikins, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of York in the U.K., expert in the human archaeology of Mesolithic Europe, and the author of the 2016 book How Compassion Made Us Human.
For the past few years, Spikins and others have been working to bring to the fore those forgotten side stories, as well as new evidence, to change the way we conceive of Neanderthals and other ancient humans while offering insight into the way that modern prosocial virtues such as compassion, tolerance, and patience may have evolved.