Can uncovering burial practices, symbolic items, and ancient social rituals give us insight into how we became the kind of creatures who care for each other?

Jessica Thompson is a paleoanthropologist and associate professor at Yale University, where she leads the Human Evolutionary Biology and Archaeology Lab. Her research focuses on early human evolution, especially in Africa, and she is known for her work examining how culture, emotion, and group dynamics shaped our species over millennia. Thompson conducts fieldwork in Malawi and has contributed significantly to understanding how symbolic behavior and mortuary practices illuminate the emergence of complex social systems.

In this episode, we explore what ancient graves and artifacts can tell us about emotional depth in early human communities. Jessica explains how the presence of pigments, grave goods, and carefully arranged bodies isn’t just archaeological data—it’s evidence of love, memory, and a desire for continuity. We discuss how grief and belonging evolved alongside our cognitive abilities and why understanding ancient death practices helps us better understand the social needs of the living. This conversation challenges modern assumptions about what it means to be "civilized" and reminds us that tenderness and remembrance have always been part of the human story.