A team of American and British archaeologists and anthropologists reached that conclusion in their study.
The genus appeared about 2.5–3 million years ago. Homo sapiens emerged around 300,000 years ago. That was a long period of evolution, influenced by many factors. Recently researchers identified the factor they believe significantly influenced the rise of the modern human who still lives on Earth today.
Humans are quite different from most of the animal kingdom. Although we often credit our survival and progress to high cognitive intelligence, a new study suggests our real evolutionary advantage may be .
Scientists define emotional intelligence as the ability to recognize your own emotions, manage them, and interact effectively with other people’s feelings.
How emotional intelligence drove human evolution
The study authors said our ability to empathize and interact with one another put our species on the path to thriving, creating diverse cultures, and global dominance.
All animals occupy an ecological niche that lets them survive in a particular environment. The cheetah, for example, with its explosive speed, fills the niche of a predator that chases prey across open daytime savannas.
By contrast, human specialization lies in managing complex social relationships. Many primates handle this well, but the team wrote that Homo sapiens are most often called the “apex of social cognition.”
Social cognition played a decisive role in our species’ biocultural evolution. It enabled us to build complex relationships within groups through cooperation and the exchange of ideas, IFLScience reports.
Crucially, we became socially advanced enough to extend those ties beyond close kin, linking tribes, clans, trade networks, and civilizations.
The authors argue that emotional self-awareness was necessary for this. It helped early humans take on long-term commitments to others’ welfare, endure frustration, plan collective projects, make sacrifices, and trust other people.
“In the context of , we argue that the progressive ability to regulate emotions was a significant achievement and a central point for studying emotional cognition using Pleistocene material and behavioral evidence,” the team wrote.
Evidence of emotional awareness and empathy appears in archaeological finds. Archaeologists often uncovered the remains of disabled and elderly people who could not have survived on their own. For example, a Neanderthal known as Shanidar I lived for several decades with severe injuries that left his arm atrophied and caused partial blindness. For him to survive so long, other group members would have had to empathize with his condition and care for him constantly for many years.
Centuries-old burial customs are another example. Deliberate ritual placements of the dead have been observed by scientists around the world. From Neanderthal graves to the remarkable burials of Homo naledi deep within South African cave systems, these practices indicate that even our ancient relatives were guided by empathy and other forms of emotional intelligence.
In widespread (and very mistaken) interpretations of Darwinism, compassion and sensitivity were sometimes seen as weaknesses people had to shed in a ruthless, competitive world where only the strongest survive. But the new study is another piece of evidence that humanity’s strength has never rested solely on ruthlessness. That strength was cemented by deep emotions and our remarkable ability to turn feelings into cooperation.
The study’s results were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
