Posted on 21 December 2010
More details can be found on the BBC website. The original article can be accessed at PLoS Biology.
Posted on 5 October 2010
A team from the Department of Archaeology at York set out to 'fill in the gap' in our knowledge of compassion in our nearest relatives the chimpanzees and that in our own species. They searched the archaeological record for evidence for compassionate acts in early humans and used the evidence to put forward a model of how a human capacity for compassion developed over the past 2 million years. They conclude that it was now beyond reasonable doubt that early humans such as Neanderthals had a deep seated capacity for compassion.The research is published in the journal Time and Mind, and is available as a book sold in aid of the charity World Vision.
For more details see