Prehistoric origins

Evidence for compassion, and the range of complex human social emotions in the past challenged perceptions of our ancestors as hard-hearted and even callous. Detecting a genuine sensitivity to prosocial emotions is essential to the evolution of altruism and compassion, and in turn judgments of moral reputation need to use all the clues available and are built over many observations. Treatments for depression, involving creating an image made of clay, imagining it as themselves and wishing themselves happiness are even evocative of compassion-focused imagery exercises. Widespread emotional commitments set in place transformations which included a widening of compassionate responses and increasingly complex social understanding as well as a greater vulnerability to our emotional motivations and greater vigilance of subtle signals of emotional competencies, expressed everywhere from personal interactions to treatment of objects. Emotional suffering and mental disorder is, of course, harder to identify archaeologically than physical illnesses and injuries.