Was early man really a killer ape? MATT CLARK meets a York academic whose research may change our view of human evolution.

HOLLYWOOD has never let facts get in the way of a good story. Take 2001: A Space Odyssey, which showed how fierce combat helped apes evolve into humans.

In fairness to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke, they were not alone in thinking we are an innately bellicose species.

Many anthropologists argue that early man was a ruthless hunter, supporting his own family group while mercilessly killing others: the 'killer ape'.

But a lecturer at the University of York claims we have the theory of human evolution all wrong.

Dr Penny Spikins says we think of our evolution as being driven by intelligence. But her research shows early humans had developed kindness and benevolence long before they learned to reason.

"Evolution has made us sociable, living in groups and looking after one another," says Dr Spikins. "Our success since then, including the evolution of intelligence, all sprang from that."

And it seems we were in touch with our feelings three million years ago. A pebble bearing an uncanny likeness to a baby's face, and found several kilometres from an Australopithecus cave, had been carried to the site.

Why keep it safe, if it wasn't because of the face?

"For reasons we don’t understand, one of these early humans must have picked up this pebble and been so taken by the object that they took it with them," Dr Spikins says.

"Did it remind them just slightly of a baby? Did they feel a need to protect and care for it? Or perhaps was it was just interesting. It is difficult to tell."

This is not the only tantalising sign of early human tenderness. Take the 530,000-year-old fossil cranium belonging to a Homo heidelbergensis child with a rare birth defect known as craniosynostosis.

The syndrome produces facial deformities and interferes with brain development. However, the age of the child is estimated at between five and 12 years. Therefore, the conclusion must be that disabled newborns were not rejected, but cared for, alongside other children.

Dr Spikins offers perhaps the earliest hard evidence for care of someone too vulnerable to look after themselves in the form of a 1.6 million-year-old skeleton found in Kenya. It is a woman who had suffered from an excessive intake of vitamin A.

The effects would have taken weeks or months to develop and would have greatly hindered her capacity for independent survival. Someone must have been feeding and protecting her.

It seems kind-heartedness wasn't only reserved for the young and sick. Of the Pleistocene era skulls discovered in Dmanisi, Georgia, one belongs to a toothless, ageing adult who had clearly lived for several years, without teeth.

He or she would have had great difficulty surviving and could only have consumed soft plant or animal foods, which surely means they had been looked after by others in the group.

At the end of the month Dr Spikins will publish her own version of events in How Compassion Made Us Human (Pen and Sword). This reversal of evolution theories is sure to court controversy in much the way Darwin was pilloried for offering explanations, however correct, that didn’t conform to expectations of the time.

"I began thinking this can't be right," she says. "Looking after each other, not killing each other is why we've been successful and now is the time and place to say it.

"I think a lot of people are seeing society in a different way. A number of biologists are saying altruism was basic to human evolution. Primatologists are saying look at all the empathy we can see in primates, the social collaboration we see in other species, especially bonobos. I'm doing this in archaeology."

But it's taken a while for Dr Spikins to feel her work would be taken credibly. She first wrote a paper on compassion in early humans in 2007 but it wasn't accepted. Three years later people were prepared to listen and now that scientists are talking more about emotions, Dr Spikins feels confident to launch her findings on to the academic world.

"Science tends to deal with tangible things but because we've had neuroscience and brain imaging for the past few years, things that were intangible and couldn't be analysed are now analysable. It's put emotions on the map."

York Press: Dr Penny SpikinsDr Penny Spikins
Dr Penny Spikins

Dr Spikins accepts her biggest challenge will be to convince others of her version of events, given the Neanderthals' image as brutes. After all, the first reconstructions were hardly complimentary, showing them as thrust forward, thuggish, stooped and hairy.

Much of that image has stuck.

"I worry about how quickly we jump to conclusions where Neanderthals are concerned. There is no real evidence that they did ever abandon anyone, even if to do so might at times be understandable. We judge people on what motivates them, and Neanderthals are no different."

Perhaps Dr Spikins' trump card is a 3,500-year-old site in South Asia where archaeologists discovered the skeleton of a man in his 30s who had been quadriplegic since he was young.

"What is remarkable is the level of care, attention and even respect with which he must have been provided. His survival required constant care, episodes of intensive nursing. Not only this but he will have had to have a specialised diet to counteract the effects of immobility, been regularly cleaned and dressed, helped to drink and eat, and even regularly moved very very gently to prevent pressure sores."

The excavators concluded that the man's community was not only experienced in looking after the sick, but had done so with compassion, respect and affection.

"Early humans' survival would have depended on co-operation; aggressive or selfish behaviour would have been very risky."

As reasoning grew so did our brains, evolving from 450 grams, three million years ago, to almost three times that size by 500,000 BC.

Changes in the size and shape of our brain suggest that pressures to be more social partly drove human evolution. But was it a drive to understand others and improve their wellbeing, or about being more cunning and manipulative to further our own?

Certainly that was the accepted theory in the 1980s, but more recent research into changes in the shape of the brain and what brain shape actually means suggest it was something to do with our social lives.

Today our brains weigh on average 1,400g, but perhaps we often don't use them as well as our ancestors. We are more angry, less sociable, more selfish. And in dismissing Australopithecines as killer apes, does that say more about us than them?

"Our origins weren't how we've invented them in our minds," says Dr Spikins, "I'm revealing those biases which previously allowed us to construct a past we thought we must have had."


Do we view ancestors in our own image?

HOW new is Dr Spikins’ idea about the ‘compassionate ape’? And how much does it reflect the post-recession times we live in?

There is some evidence that we tend to view our distant ancestors in our own image – so that our understanding of our past varies with our own times.

Dr Spikins says research in the 1930s fitted in with the mood of the time by speaking of man’s innate ability to kill. The compassionate theory would hardly be welcomed by nations about to go to war.

In the consumerist Eighties, meanwhile, we focused on socio-economics.

“But since the recession we’ve stopped believing the competitive market and and individualist view of the world drove our origins,” Dr Spikins says. “We’ve seen it doesn’t necessarily work.”

A classic example of building an image of our early ancestors based on dubious evidence was Piltdown man. Hailed in 1912 as the missing link, it influenced research into human evolution until revealed as a hoax in 1953.

We wanted to believe in it. We wanted our ancestors to have a big brain, to look ape like and to come from Europe. That was the answer, no need to look any further, no need to ask any more questions.

So is the compassionate ape Dr Spikins’ Piltdown exposé moment?

“In the book I’m trying to move people along to the idea that it is completely possible to have misplaced ideas of human origins. And to ask are we doing it too?”

She just doesn’t accept the prevailing idea of rational economic ancestors motivated largely by self-interest.

We live today in a cut-and-thrust urban world, whereas early human settlements consisted of around 25 people.

“Perhaps 25 is the optimum number for us. It’s manageable, there’s no need for hierarchy, therefore none of the kick-down bullying that is so often seen in large groups, companies and cities, which can kill compassion.

“Tiny primates were not surviving because they are individually big and strong. Even before hunting, collaborative defence from predators involves self control,” Dr Spikins says. “The Inuit still live as hunter-gatherers in small numbers and can’t afford to have anger or bullies, that would mess it up for everyone. They have self control and emotional balance.”

Maybe, then, the very first thing we learned to do was care.

“Tellingly, people who live a hunting and gathering way of life are often surprised by how insensitive we seem to them – both to people we meet and the world around us. Is this perhaps because their collaborative way of life, interdependence and relative lack of constant stimuli encourages greater sensitivity?”

Dr Spikins claims to have found evidence of early sensitivity and self-control displayed through material things, offering, as an example, a 250,000-year-old hand axe, found in Norfolk. It was fashioned from a rock containing a fossilised shell and designed to make the fossil the tool’s centrepiece.

Does this suggest an early sense of aesthetics?

“By 1.8 million years ago, at least, there is abundant evidence that material objects can be cared for in ways that go well beyond the practical.

“A uniquely human feeling lies behind both the creation of such finely crafted tools and caring for the vulnerable. It suggests early humans, from two million years ago, were emotionally similar to us.”