Oldest Technology Gets Older

Ephemeris writes: ""A collection of bone tools dating back 70,000 years is raising new questions about human evolution. The discovery suggests that our early human ancestors were far more sophisticated than previously thought..." This story has the details of the find. Any armchair anthropologists want to toss up ideas as to whether or not spoken language (a necessary precursor to the recent anomoly known as civilization) was alive & kicking 70,000 years ago?"

Comments

Mixing up

[Man of E]

Whoa, slow down, things are getting mixed up. Old stone tools have nothing to do with human language at all. While language may be a prerequisite for civilization, stone tools are not. We can hypothesize all we want on when our ancestors learned to speak (and somehow, we'd have to define what a true "language" is, versus a collection of grunts and hand signals), but this discovery sheds no light on it at all.

All we know from this is that people used bone tools; I assume this means knives and spear heads, mostly. The article also mentions "modern behaviour" - I'm not quite sure what that is, exactly. Still I doubt that creating bone tools (which is arguably not easy) requires "civilization" or "language". That's a different discussion entirely.

Can anyone clarify what "Modern behaviour" means in this context?