On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Jim Choate wrote:
On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
'People' have only been around about a half a million years (depending on how stringent one is in defining human).
We're recent(!)hairless apes.
My opinion is even more stringent than that. The archaeological record shows human-like anatomy starting about half a million years ago, but no evidence of symbolic thought or individual experimentation with / invention of tools prior to about the year -38K. Up to that point, you've just got a few classical tools, made the same way generation after generation after generation, and after that point you've suddenly got cave paintings, tools made out of unfamiliar materials, tools made for new purposes, people buried with grave goods (proof that someone at least thought *something* about death), sculptures of animals and carvings that could not serve as tools (and thus are probably classifiable as art), etc. Something fundamental changed only 40,000 years ago, and even though there have been *anatomically* modern humans for about a half million years, I pretty strongly suspect that there weren't *mentally* modern humans until that change. It may have been the development of language that made the difference. Ray