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            One day a student asked anthropologist Margaret Mead for the earliest sign of civilization in a given culture.  He expected the answer to be a clay pot or perhaps a fish hook or grinding stone.  Her answer was “a healed femur.”

            Mead explained that no healed femurs are found where the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest, reigns.  A healed femur shows that someone cared.  Someone had to do that injured person’s hunting and gathering until the leg healed.  The evidence of compassion is the first sign of civilization. - R. Wayne Willis

Leadership, Fall 1995, page 41