Early hominins who sailed across oceans left indirect evidence that they might have been the first to use language

PRIOR TO THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION, humans of all species lived exclusively on the Afro-Asian landmass. True, they had settled a few islands by swimming short stretches of water or crossing them on improvised rafts. Flores, for example, was colonised as far back as 850,000 years ago. Yet

This would have brought about an unprecedented transformation in human capabilities and lifestyles. Every other mammal that went to sea – seals, sea cows, dolphins – had to evolve for aeons to develop specialised organs and a hydrodynamic body. The Sapiens in Indonesia, descendants of apes who lived on the African savannah, became Pacific seafarers

Whatever the causes, humanity achieved a measure of “modernity” in the Upper Paleolithic, in terms of language, arts, religion, and other aspects of culture. Human cultures began to flourish. Populations increased, which may have been both a cause and an effect of the cultural changes. Higher population densities may have increased the competitive

This imaginary ancestral primate crossed a crucial evolutionary threshold as it entered a regime of cumulative cultural evolution. This threshold is the point at which culturally transmitted information begins to accumulate over generations, such that tools and know-how get increasingly better fit to the local environments—this is the “ratchet effe

Across large geographic expanses, and through time, these Palaeolithic people were doing things in many different ways – from the types of stone tools they made to the way they treated the bodies of the dead. And it’s that variability – which surely represents the ability to create culture, to innovate, to think and behave in ways which seem human