The Cognitive Revolution

For roughly 200,000 years after Homo sapiens first appeared, our ancestors lived much like other hominin species. They made stone tools. They hunted. They gathered. Their technology improved, but slowly, achingly slowly by modern standards.

Then, somewhere between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, something shifted. In evolutionary terms, it happened fast. Humans began doing things no other species had done: painting on cave walls, burying their dead with ritual objects, trading goods over hundreds of kilometers, making specialized tools for specific tasks, and communicating in ways that suggest complex language.

Historians and anthropologists call this explosion of new behavior the A period roughly 70,000–30,000 years ago when Homo sapiens began displaying dramatically new cognitive abilities: symbolic thought, complex language, art, and long-distance trade. The exact cause remains debated..