The article seems to miss the point many times.

I think a useful definition of empathy describes it as the ability to feel what another person is feeling.

It for example says: "With social relations expanding beyond the circle of close kin, kinship obligations were no longer enough to ensure mutual assistance and stop free riding. There was thus selection for pro-social behavior, i.e., a spontaneous willingness to help not only kin but also non-kin."

Group selection is not a well accepted phenomena. Especially for a short timeframe of 10,000 years.

Furthermore the author shies away from going outright to the logical conclusions. If the author thinks that those people in towns evolved to have more empathy, that basically means that Black people have less empathy than white people. Is that what the author is arguing? That's certainly an interesting claim.

The author doesn't seem to be aware of the tradeoff between dominance and empathy. More testosterone equals more dominance and makes people less empathic. Given differences in penis size and some studies, Blacks might have higher testosterone than Whites. Of course that's a highly controversial debate.